Is there some smart financial person who can explain to me how Professional Bank in Coral Gables

[pnwmom]

with assets of less than $900K, according to its website, lent millions to Trump for a mortgage on the $11 million house he bought from his sister?

Is there some special category of a bank that doesn't include its customers assets under its assets?

ON EDIT: Never mind, FBaggins pointed me to the answer, at #3 below.

https://myprobank.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Professional-Bank-2019-Q1-Financials.pdf

[dhol82]

1. He lied.

Simple.

[kimbutgar]

2. What year the mortgage initiated ?

It this was money laundering the traceable assets were depleted years ago after the mortgage was initiated. Today’s financial records are meaningless. I’d like to see the bank asset records when the original mortgage was taken out and the year after.

[FBaggins]

3. You misread their assets

The reported figure is "in thousands"... which means they have $832.5 million.

Added to that... most mortgages are sold (e.g. to Fannie/Freddie), so the bank doesn't commit all of those assets to the loan.

[pnwmom]

7. Thank you! I searched that site and couldn't find it till you told me --

and there it was in the gray print in the corner.

[FBaggins]

8. Should be on every page with figures

"$ in thousands"

Looking at their most recent quarterly report, it's on the top-left of each page. https://myprobank.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Professional-Bank-2019-Q1-Financials.pdf

For the record - you can't possibly run a bank with a million dollars in assets. Even with a spectacular net-interest-margin of 5%, you would barely have enough to pay one employee (let alone actually run the company). I'd estimate that it takes closer to 100mil.

[pnwmom]

9. I knew a bank couldn't possibly have that few assets, but I just couldn't see that notation

till you told me. And even then, I had to look at that page twice!

[Sneederbunk]

4. May lead one to believe banks are not well regulated.

[CincyDem]

5. Hard to say without seeing the paperwork. Lots of ways.

One that's particularly common is that Professional Bank "brokered" the mortgage...meaning that they resold it into the commercial mortgage market. It's likely, with only 900k in assets, they actually wrote the mortgage on someone else's paper.

I've seen financial institutions with 70-80milion in assets that have done 3-4 billion in mortgages. But what they were really doing was managing the paperwork for a third party. The issue here is that the loan was likely qualified by Professional Bank and then represented to the commercial market. The guy currently holding the mortgage likely doesn't even know the mortgage holder.

What this will do for Trump is ensure that the details of his loans will be held very very closely at a bank that has no financial ties or regulatory obligations outside a friendly state (aka Florida). It's like Wells, BofA, Chase...someone like that probably holds the actual note but they probably don't know that it's a Trump property. Therefore when they're subpoenaed they won't have to disclose it.

Squirrelly for sure but it's how a lot of the mortgage business still works.

[CincyDem]

6. PS - if they've got 900million, they probably keep it in house...or they could sell it. n/t