In other news, the Washington Post reports that profits at Trump's hotel in Chicago have dropped by nearly 90 percent according to a request filed by lawyers looking for lower tax bills.
Profits fell 89 percent from 2015 to 2018, from $16.7 million to $1.8 million, according to documents filed with Cook County, Ill. Trump’s hotel struggled even as other Chicago hotels held steady or thrived.
“Performance of [the Trump hotel] is clearly disassociated from that of its competitive set,” the company’s lawyers said in a letter to the county seeking to lower the hotel’s taxes.
Meanwhile, a New York state judge has ordered Trump to pay $2 million for using his defunct fake charity, the Trump Foundation, to support his campaign in 2016.
Finally, Reuters reports that recent shipments of soybeans from the U.S. to China are still sitting in ports and haven't been officially imported into the market because China has not technically granted any waivers from tariffs yet.
The government never made the details of these waivers public, however, as well as how to implement such waivers. [...]
"Since local customs did not get an explicit policy on paper (about the change of tariffs) from above, they could only implement the most recent one, according to which tariffs on U.S. soybeans are 33%," said one of the sources.
Though only impacting a single cargo so far, the trade hiccup has stoked worries among other buyers of U.S. beans that they may face similar calls to make deposit payments when their cargoes arrive in the coming weeks.
This is a story worth watching. One false move by Trump and the beans will be left to rot.