In his ABC interview Donald Trump said that he had no debts in Russia or to Russians. That may be true. But he went on to make a much more declaratory statement.
No debts. I have very little debt to anybody. I don’t need debt. You know, it’s very interesting. I’m so liquid, I don’t need debt. And if I need debt, if I want debt, I can get it from banks in New York City very easily.
“Very little debt” is of course a relative and imprecise term and I depends entirely on one’s total assets. But in a recent detailed analysis, Bloomberg news placed Trump’s total net worth at $3 billion dollars while noting that his debt has grown from $350 million to $630 million in just the last year. Notably we can’t compare that debt load to cash flow. I’ll leave to financial analysts to decide whether that makes Trump over-leveraged. But I don’t think anyone would say that counts as “very little debt.”
Next, he can always get money from the banks in New York City?
That’s not true. It is an open secret on Wall Street that the relatively small remaining number of big American banks refuse to do business with Trump. They are unwilling to take on what Wall Street bankers refer to as “Donald Risk”.
For evidence of this, see item #2 in this post. I don’t believe we have any positive evidence of loans outstanding in Russia, as opposed to Russian equity investment in America projects or projects outside of Russia. But his free willingness to mislead or lie on these other points makes an adverse inference certainly possible.
