When Mitt Romney was running for President, I recall some disclosure about his 401(k) value — something like 20-100 million dollars. The guy was like 65 years old. Even if he’d started contributing in 1978 & dropped in the full 30k you could do at the time … that’d be 1.2 mil in contributions over the course of his lifetime. Which is an amazing rate of return if you factor in normal market performance over the 34 years. Contribution limits sure aren’t 30k per year anymore! How do you get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in an account? You get a special class of stock priced at one penny, put in 15k worth of it (1,500,000 shares) into your 401(k). And then revalue the stock at 10$ a share. Giving you 15 million dollars when there’s a 15k contribution limit.

Donald Trump’s billion dollar loss (great business acumen, huh?) — assuming it was a legit loss (and I think we know why the guy gets audited every year. If he’s still carrying forward his billion dollar loss … he’s got something funky on each return that may well flag it for audit) and it’s actually debt (not just loss of value) — where is that debt? That’s what reminded me of Romney’s 401(k) … if you are dealing with internal funny money, can you then proceed to buy that debt for pennies on the dollar (I’ll sell you this billion dollars of debt for a mere million dollars) and then never attempt to collect it? The debt still exists, your earnings are tax free as they are offset by that loss … but really there isn’t even debt.