January 16, 2016
THE BUYER OF WHITE SWANS:
What Donald Trump's Plaza Deal Reveals About His White House Bid (DAVID SEGAL, JAN. 16, 2016, NY Times)
Mr. Trump quickly agreed to a price of slightly more than $400 million, an unprecedented sum for a hotel at the time. Just a few years later, the Plaza wound up in bankruptcy protection, part of a vast and humiliating restructuring of some $900 million of personal debt that Mr. Trump owed to a consortium of banks. [...]By 1990, the Plaza needed an operating profit of $40 million a year to break even, according to financial records that Mr. Trump disclosed at the time. The hotel had fallen well short of that goal, and with renovating expenses, in one year it burned through $74 million more than it brought in. [...]"The fact is, you do feel invulnerable," Mr. Trump told Timothy O'Brien, author of "Trump Nation," discussing this period in his life. "And then you have a tendency to take your eye off the ball a little bit and hunt around for women. And hunt around for models."A lack of focus was not Mr. Trump's only problem
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 16, 2016 11:39 AM