Did Trump Really Root for a Housing Crash?

A tag-team strategy by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that insists Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump openly cheered the possibility of a housing crash in 2006 has been challenged by Rick Newman, a columnist for Yahoo! Finance.

Clinton and Warren took comments that Trump made in a 2006 audiobook about buying low and selling high in real estate as evidence that he hoped for the housing market’s collapse. But Newman used his column to question the validity of this tactic.

“There’s no evidence Trump ever made money on the housing bust,” he wrote. “In fact, he may have lost money. And the idea he was hoping to profit from the misfortune of ordinary Americans is a stretch. Trump is a commercial real-estate developer, and like any investor, he hopes to take advantage of cycles to buy low and sell high. That’s the same thing ordinary home buyers hope to do, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

“Plus,” Newman continued, “as a commercial developer, Trump was probably thinking of ways he might capitalize on a drop in the price of office, resort and apartment buildings, not homes that would have to be abandoned by middle-class families. Markets ebb and flow all the time, with buyers and sellers constantly losing at each other’s expense. Usually, there’s no perfidy involved.”

Newman also observed that one of Trump’s least successful ventures involved housing: Trump Mortgage, which launched as a residential and commercial lender in 2006 and folded a year later as the housing market deteriorated.

“Trump actually doesn’t do a lot of real-estate development any more, as Slate pointed out recently,” Newman added. “Instead, he earns most of his income by licensing his name, renting space in buildings he already owns and charging management fees. So maybe he’s not so good at predicting the direction of the real-estate market after all.”