Slim Cognito wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 1:59 pm
Is that how a Ponzi scheme works?
It seems to me (and I'm not a financial guy) that this is a linear scam while a Ponzi scheme is a pyramid. In other words, a Ponzi scheme depends on continually increasing the number of marks paying in so that you can pay off the marks from earlier (minus, of course, what you skim off). In this scam, you only have one lender at a time so (at least for each individual property) there isn't an ever-growing base of "investors" who will be screwed once the supply of new marks drys up. Unless, of course, you use your profits to buy other properties -- like by trying to build a real estate empire -- and keep increasing the size of your debt until (a) you can't find new lenders and go bankrupt (which, of course, has happened to Trump several times); or (b) you find lenders that aren't interested in making money but are very interested in the leverage they have over you.
Apropos of nothing, was it Eric or Donnie Jr. when asked about how they were getting their funding (on a Golf channel interview over a decade ago) said that they could get all of the money they needed from Russia? And why did a Canadian bank controlled by the Saudis pick up Jared Kushner's loan just a bit ago?
My question to Mr. Brolin is: if all of this is right, and Trump's lenders are no longer financial bottom feeders, but rather people who care more about having leverage on, say, someone who controls a large political cult of personality and had a position where he could embed a large number of partisan moles in a large federal government and might have that position once again, what happens when someone -- say a nice New York prosecutor lady -- comes along an drags everything out in the open?
Now I'm "just asking questions" based on speculation here, but if this were true, we might have seen some signs of it in the past. Oh, I don't know, something like someone who was known to be indebted to the Russian oligarchs planted at the highest levels of the Trump campaign so that these creditors could keep an eye on their asset and get insider data that they could use to engineer a massive disinformation campaign to help their pawn achieve high political office -- maybe even the presidency of the United States. *cough* Paul Manifort *cough*. Sorry, something in my throat there...
If this is all true, it would certainly explain why no one is interested in calling their loans -- they don't care about the money, they care about what they purchased with it: Trump. They want him to remain a viable candidate to reclaim the presidency as long as possible and do as much damage as possible to the United States if he is taken down.
But what do I know?
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