1988: THE YEAR OF SPENDING DANGEROUSLY. At the early peak of his success, Donald Trump pulled the trigger on a manic series of deals that nearly brought him down.

The article reads like a real-life version of Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko character from Wall Street, including this vivid denouement:

In 1990 and 1991, as Trump came out with the sequel to The Art of the Deal, titled Surviving at the Top, as his affair with Maples and his divorce from his wife became a major tabloid story, and as his total debt topped $3 billion, $900 million of which he had personally guaranteed, his lenders took back the yacht, the shuttle, the Plaza Hotel. The only thing that saved Trump from personal bankruptcy and permanent financial ruin: loans from his rich father and his siblings, and the severity, strangely, of his fiscal straits. The money was so big, the loans so brazen, that not only was he beholden to the banks—the banks were beholden to him. “Leverage: Don’t make deals without it,” Trump has said, and here his leverage was we’re in this together. The banks had been just as irresponsible as he had.

“I have a great relationship with the banks,” he told Time in 1991.

I’m not locked in here with you, you‘re locked in here with me.

Note this, though: “Trump’s frenzied 1988 matched the country’s ostentatious and indulgent mood at the end of the Reagan administration.” Which is pretty remarkable, because I vividly remember sitting in a business class in college the day after Black Monday in October of 1987 in which the professor and students pondered if this was the onset of a new Great Depression. As with what financial author James Grant described as The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself, it’s almost as if government doing nothing or comparatively little during a financial crisis is the best policy.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)