Well, for 30 years my job was to collect and analyze financial information for the purpose of extending credit to customers for commercial real estate projects. The last 15 years was spent managing teams of bankers who did the same thing. I’m not an expert on much, but I know this stuff inside out.

Commie Tom, no banker worth his salt pays any attention to real estate values provided by a customer. When you are making loans the size of those obtained by Trump the personal financial statement really doesn’t matter because the loans don’t carry personal recourse and your borrowing entity will be required to be a single asset, bankruptcy remote, entity.

You are underwriting the project. The only concern with the borrower is being able to verify they have the required equity available to meet the difference between the project cost and the loan amount plus a cushion to be able to fund any cost overruns/out of balance situation.

Any real estate taken as collateral must, by federal law, be appraised by a third party, independent, certified appraiser, but the bank has already come up with their own max loan value before that appraisal is received. That’s because bank’s lend on cash flow, not appraised value. The only time the appraisal comes in to play is if the value doesn’t support the amount you planned on lending based on your cash flow projections.

I would say about half of all my real estate customers over the years inflated their net worth by overstating property values. I base this on the fact that I always valued off cash flow and what multiples people were paying for that cash flow based on property type. Customer values are really nothing but their opinion. Some would value it based on what they thought they could sell it for, some would use what they paid for it, some would use most recent appraisal, but it didn’t matter because the job of the bank is to make its own determination of values.

This is a crap suit. She claiming he committed fraud, but she’s missing something rather important - who’s the victim of the fraud? No bank is claiming Trump defrauded them. No investor is claiming Trump committed fraud against them. No insurance company is claiming fraud. Who did he commit this fraud against?