If this truly represents the bulk of Trump’s cash, then there is a reason to maintain control over it rather than locking it up for a relatively indeterminate period of time.
It’s sort of like using your credit card as a “float” in order to preserve cash for needs that you can anticipate.
He has ongoing business concerns – such as they are. He may simply want to preserve cash for daily operations.
I mean, it was just a $175,000,000 bond for a former President. I do like, twenty of those a week.
But the assumption is he’s pledge this money as collateral for the bond. Thus, he couldn’t use any for daily operations. Something is fishy. No surprise.
I thought much/most of it was in the form of a brokerage account?
Sure, but the deal has to be he can’t touch it. Otherwise, it could all be spent before it’s needed. Like that $400 million in cash he had a few months ago.
Thanks, this makes sense. I’ve read in several places that more than one of Trump’s loans require him to maintain a certain level of liquidity or the loans get called. That could be reason enough.
But but but… If the account is encumbered by being liable to be seized by Knight to pay the bond… It’s not exactly liquid is it?
I am really starting to think that once the appeal of this NY case is finished (and the appeal of the Carroll case as well), that Trump’s business will completely crater, as the house of cards of loans paying off loans etc. completely collapses.
And that will, IMO, be compounded if/when he loses the election and starts dropping off the radar. People are likely to offer him a lot less leniency if they don’t have to worry about him dragging them through the mud on (inter)national TV if they only go so far as to treat him fairly.
i believe that was the collateral for the chubb bond.
I have to take back my post and try it again.
Trump did use a brokerage account to collateralize the defamation judgment.
It seems as though he collateralized the Civil Fraud Judgment bond (Knight) with a combination of cash and – maybe – investment-grade bonds.
Yeah. It is hard keeping track of his limitless recidivism.
ETA: this may be part of what had me confused:
He said the cash is held at a brokerage firm and pledged to Knight, and that Knight can access it if needed.
Having cash in a brokerage account isn’t at all unusual.
Seriously though, shouldn’t the state of NY be the ones with an account currently holding those funds??
Requiring this kind of bond in order to stay a judgment (ie, stop collection efforts) and – in some jurisdictions – allow an appeal to go forward is a pretty common thing:
It’s not unlike a criminal defendant who can post either cash or a bond in order to be released on bail.
All the same reasons an actual wealthy person might take on debt.
All right, the fishy smell has now returned…
From memory, a couple of the loans that Trump took out had unencumbered liquidity requirements of maybe $30-50 million. A couple, I think, also had net worth floors of maybe $2.5BN.
I don’t know which, if any, of those loans are still outstanding or if they’ve been paid off or refinanced. I also don’t know if they each required a separate and distinct pot of money that they could hope to attach or whether any and all lenders were – even if only by default – content to have a fungible, generic pot of money that Trump could readily access.
But if those are the only kind of numbers that we’re talking about, then – without really knowing anything about his true financial condition – getting that $474M bond number down to $175M probably allowed him to continue to meet any of these outstanding requirements.
Probably 
But … cod? Is it cod we’re smelling??
I knew it!
Donald Trump never bought anything COD.
More like garum.
That’s only because it no longer counts as COD if you grab the D without providing the C.
Hmmm. That sounds dirtier than I meant it to but I’m not changing it now.