Those are valid points. For comparison, how many bankruptcies has someone like Warren Buffet been part of?
I’m not familiar with the nuance of Trump’s operations to determine if he had the requisite amount of focus and follow through - how do you make that evaluation?
Your measure of a successful businessperson needs to be recalibrated. The primary measure of success in business is money, or profits. If you have 10 investments and one of them fails and loses $1M, but the other nine are successful and earn $10M in profits - that’s a huge win.
How do you think the USA should be divvied up with strategic default in mind, and which states do you think President Trump should throw under the bus?
It was a subject in the first debate. I forget if it was brought up by a candidate or the totally “evil and unfair” FoxNews moderators. All anybody really seemed to talk about in the aftermath was his tantrums over Megyn Kelly.
There really isn’t much comparison between the two. Buffet is an investor. Basically he buys shares of stock in companies on speculation. Trump on the other hand, sought out the location of his casinos, acquired the properties, built the buildings, purchased the furniture, fixtures and gambling and oversight equipment, hired and supervised the employees, and operated his casinos profitably for some time until, like I said, the casino business in New Jersey tanked. Apart from the times he merely licensed his name, this has been the major thrust Trump’s business activity - finding properties, putting up buildings, hiring and supervising the people who run them, and making sure they’re run within certain perameters so as to be sufficiently profitable. This is a much more difficult, risky and complicated type of business enterprise than what Buffet does.
If you’re serious I’ll come back and post a serious answer. But first I’d like you to propose an example of just how you think any such thing would be necessary, feasible and, most importantly, possible.
That’s a good question and I’d be interested to know the answer, but I don’t have nearly enough time to sort through all of Berkshire Hathaway’s assets and see which ones have filed bankruptcy. Maybe none have, I have no idea.
What?
Do you think it’s possible to operate differently with different fact patterns or objectives?
The original question was why isn’t bankruptcies being made a larger focus - the answer is that people who understand how business works know that it doesn’t matter in this context.
Yeah, keep in mind Warren Buffett doesn’t view himself as a business manager, he views himself as an investor who buys controlling interests in companies through his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate (which itself is almost like a giant mutual fund) and he says his real skill other than finding undervalued companies is picking good managers. He knows he can’t run a rail company, but if he sees a rail company that he feels is undervalued and has good management in place, that’s a promising prospect.
Buffett rarely buys into a deal that requires a management overhaul–be believes that adds tons of intrinsic risk, and thinks it’s far better to buy an undervalued company that is being managed well and is only undervalued due to what he views as “short term irrationalities” in the market.
The only exceptions I’m aware of are when he’s done deals in partnership. Like he worked with a Brazilian firm to do the Burger King deal, and that did require a management replacement, but the Brazilian firm (which Buffett had worked with before, and knew they specialized at doing management overhauls well) were the side of the deal responsible for overhauling BK’s management. Buffett never would’ve bought into BK if he had to get involved in fixing management himself.
Donald Trump is an assclown, but the bankruptcies for one have been brought up (multiple times in the first few debates) and also don’t really matter. In the property business you typically incorporate each property development as its own company. If it fails, it fails. In that context a bankruptcy is more like owning 100 stocks in a brokerage, and one of those companies busts and you sell the stock at a vast loss. That’s a more accurate description of Donald’s bankruptcies relative to his empire.
He did have some personal financial troubles as well, though, due to a cash squeeze across the larger Trump organization. However he never went bankrupt, because his debts were so large, the banks actually were willing to negotiate a deal with him because they feared they’d lose far more if they pushed him into personal bankruptcy. So the truth of the matter is Trump did come very close to personal bankruptcy.
Is Trump a good businessman? He’s okay, he’s not terrible. But he’s not an amazing business person like Buffett or Gates, whose wealth multiplied vastly faster than the S&P 500. I’ve read that if Trump had taken his inheritance from his dad and put it in an S&P 500 Index Fund, he’d be worth roughly the same amount today. What does that mean? It means all his business activity has not generated him outsize returns and he could’ve worked 100% less and made the same amount of money by just sitting at home and letting his inheritance grow with the stock market.
That being said, he’s a real estate mogul not a mutual fund manager, so his success isn’t necessarily judged vs S&P 500. Most people would probably do worse than Donald has with his starting position because it’s actually easy to just go completely bankrupt in real estate, so there was a real risk of Donald losing all his money, the fact that he’s roughly equaled the S&P 500 means he’s not done bad, but he’s not so amazing he should be considered the world’s best businessman.
It’s also worth noting a lot of Trump’s early business deals were possible on large part due to his “inside” information (as someone born and raised in the real estate industry in NYC) that allowed him to buy properties he knew would be increasing in value due to future developments other investors might not know about. But there’s no such thing as illegal “insider trading” in the real estate business, so there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s worth pointing out his privilege didn’t just come from a big inheritance, he also inherited his dad’s government and local business connections and insider access.
I agree, and therefore people who understand how business works should know that Trump’s self-aggrandizing “business success” – his only claim to any kind of accomplishment whatsoever – equally doesn’t matter in the context of his qualifications to be President.
And that’s the charitable interpretation. The less charitable one is that he not only has zero experience as a political leader and is so arrogant, bombastic, egotistical, and hypersensitive that he’d be useless trying to be one, but also that his businesses accomplishments seem to feature serial bankruptcies – four of them – so one wonders if he can even run a business, either.
No, if you own 100 stocks sitting in a brokerage you’re not actively managing the underlying companies. You make a one-time decision based on whatever – maybe a thorough study of fundamentals, maybe technical indicators, maybe just a hunch – and the rest has nothing to do with you and largely a matter of fate and whatever wisdom was in the initial judgment. AFAIK the Donald was actively managing these disasters and in at least some instances drove them into the ground. Now he’s getting more into just selling the brand, like the Trump Tower in Toronto – a pretentious white elephant that turned into a complete disaster for both the developer and the individual investors, but the Donald has his money and couldn’t care less.
It’s a terribly poor and transparent tactic to say you agree with something, then immediately try to reframe what you are agreeing with in a way that is inconsistent with the actual message you’re trying to convey. Why do you do that? It’s fine if you actually don’t agree, but using this tactic devolves conversation into a back and forth about what someone actually said or meant. Let your points stand on their own.
And then a non-sequitur rant - it’s almost as if you’re engaging in some kind of performance art. Just strange.
Eh, he had oversight of them but was probably not running the casinos–he had general managers for that. At least a few of them went tits up along with literally every other similar game in town, that’s a sign of an geographic economic problem and not really attributable to Trump.
Plus, as I said–the attacks over his bankruptcies were tried heavily in the first few debates. The reason they stopped is they don’t work–voters don’t care, Trump’s explanation either satisfied them or they never cared about it in the first place. The average voter sees that Trump is a billionaire and that’s all the proof they need of his business acumen.
If he is the nominee, he is going to get hit with the eminent domain issue much more than the bankruptcy issue. Democrats will hit the Vera Coking story pretty hard when Trump tried to take away an old lady’s house to build a gaudy casino. The best part is that our grand negotiator lost to said old lady. Jeb tried to hit him with it, but Hillary or Bernie will cream him with it.
Republicans just love eminent domain.
Well Cruz is currently running an ad highlighting eminent domain so I guess we’ll see.
Do you realize what you’re saying? A bunch of investors and a developer come to Trump and ask to capitalize on his name by licensing it for a new building they want to put up. He says sure, takes their money, and they proceed to design and construct a building that you now characterize as a white elephant and a disaster, and somehow it’s all his fault? And not only that but in taking money for the use of his name beforehand he’s guilty of some sort of moral failing? What would you have him do? Do you think he should say “Sorry you guys put up such a turkey of a building in the hopes my name would draw a crowd, but since it didn’t I’m gonna give you all your money back, just because?”
Trump fulfilled his end of the bargain by allowing them to use his name and that’s what he was paid for. The rest of it is on them and he’s not guilty of any sort of moral failing by keeping the money they paid for the use of his name. The fact it has apparently not paid off for them is not his fault.
The stuff you’ve been coming with in this thread just doesn’t make any kind of sense. It looks like you’re letting your anti-Trump bias cloud your judgement and ability to think straight.
Meh. Thousands if not millions of people in this country have lost their homes to eminent domain over time in this country, and I’m sure some of them were little old people who didn’t want to move either. But without eminent domain, housing additions, shopping centers, schools, prisons, roads and highways all would not exist.
Further, it could be argued that by selfishly insisting on holding onto her property when everyone else was willing to sell, she was depriving the city and its citizens of a casino that would provide many benefits to her community, such as a much needed increase in tax revenue and hundreds of jobs.
There are different ways of looking at things and it all depends on perspective. I’m certainly sympathetic that an old person may not want to move from their longtime homestead, but the other side of the coin is true also and often it happens that people in this country are forced to move to make way for projects that serve the greater good of the community and its people.
Generally speaking I think most people are okay with eminent domain for the public purpose, but eminent domain solely for “economic revitalization” or “economic development” has always been controversial. The Kelo v New London case that revolved around this topic was deeply controversial.
Some people have always bitched when their homes had to be destroyed to make way for a new government building, road, transmission line or etc, but the majority of society realized it was necessary. Eminent domain to force out people who are holding steadfast to their property in spite of a large for-profit property development are seen very differently by most–including myself, to be frank. I disagreed greatly with the Kelo ruling.
Well the story has been out a while but it looks like Cruz is going hammer at it. Let’s see how much traction it gets and how Trump plays it.
Nothing wrong with that, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. My point is just that there are different ways of looking at things, that they can all have merit, and that a person looking to displace someone through eminent domain is merely utilizing a common and longstanding tool of progress that benefits many and should not automatically be presumed to be acting out of heartless, selfish or evil intent.