If We Just Got Rid of the Regulations, All Would be Well
I haven’t seen the latest New York Times Stylebook, but I bet there’s an entry under “S” on how to base an opinion column around the stupidest of stupid takes. Then again, maybe there isn’t.
The latest edition of The Stylebook is nearly 10 years old at this point. Looks like it’s time for an update.
Apparently, I start a lot of my columns with some form of “…in a sea of stupid takes…”, as evidenced by this column, this column and this column. But can you blame me? The New York Times seems to employ the most opinion writers with the stupidest takes on the day’s news.
The latest example: columnist Peter Coy and his column entitled: “Why Donald Trump Can’t Put Up a Bond.” It took Coy 396 words to explain to us why Donald Trump can’t pay the more than $450 million he owes to the State of New York after being found guilty of fraud. I can “name that tune” in five words: “Because he’s not a billionaire.”
Ah, but there’s a twist. Mr. Coy claims Donald Trump can’t pay his bills because he’s being hampered by regulations on the insurance industry. Yep, that’s right. Because of those pesky rules insurance companies have to play by, Donald Trump can’t come up with $450 million.
Mr. Coy opens with the claim that any insurance company that underwrites a bond to guarantee the money Donald Trump owes because of his latest scheme to screw everyone he comes in contact with out of anything he can get from them, “would undoubtedly be criticized by those who don’t like the ex-president.”
“Chubb Insurance found that out when it underwrote a much smaller bond in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against him,” Coy states as proof of the above.
Oh my God! Someone might actually criticize an insurance company! Think of the children!
I see where this is going.
It’s not politics. Oh, no. It’s regulation. Just eliminate all regulations in the insurance industry and Trump will pay his bills, no problem. Simple as that.
“In an unregulated insurance market, Trump would have been able to come up with a surety bond with ease because his net worth far exceeds the size of the bond he needs,” Mr. Coy writes, proving he has no clue how the surety bond industry works. Hey, maybe we should eliminate their regulations too, eh, Peter?
You see, if there were no regulations on the industry, any bond company would take Trump’s bullshit claim that he’s a billionaire at face value (without checking it out of course) and that he could easily pay back the bond. He could put up, say, $1 billion in real estate as collateral and all would be well. But those pesky regulations forbid surety companies from doing business this way.
The problem is that the bond companies are regulated. They need to see financial statements and accounts to get some sense of your actual worth. They will not just take your word for it. And they don’t usually accept real estate as collateral because the real estate industry is notoriously cyclical. And as we have seen with Trump’s fraud case, a lot of real estate is severely overvalued. But, hey, sure, put up real estate worth $400 million and claim it’s worth $1 billion. What could go wrong?
“Some enterprising business would have asked him to put up some of his real estate holdings — say, $1 billion worth — as collateral. For good measure, it would have charged him a high premium on the bond,” Coy writes.
Oh, well, thank God they would charge him a high premium. I guess we really don’t need regulations. We can charge him high premiums. Problem solved.
Thankfully, insurance regulations don’t allow surety companies to accept real estate as collateral and don’t allow them to charge high premiums on their bonds. Probably because they want to avoid people like Donald Trump.
The Republicans sure are fond of their deregulation. If they had their way, there would be no regulation in any industry. And people like Donald Trump could keep getting away with his fiction that he’s a billionaire and that his gold-plated real estate is worth something.