WASHINGTON – For the first president debate, the candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump dispensed with the pleasantries almost immediately. They began swinging at the first question on job creation and never ceased throughout the 95-minute debate, held at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. From that first question, Clinton and Trump quickly pivoted into a quasi free-for-all (with debate moderator NBC News veteran Lester Holt struggling hard to control the flow) that ranged from ISIS, cyber warfare, Trump's personal taxes, and Clinton's email server scandal to whether stop-and-frisk is constitutional.
Their answers have since been picked over, fact-checked and refuted ad nauseam.
Except one interesting opinion that Trump voiced — an opinion that should be of great interest to the commercial real estate industry.
No Support for Carried Interest
First, though, let's make clear one fact: Trump is a New York developer and businessman and some of his policy proposals would be welcome by this group. Not all, however — in one key respect he has gone completely off script: his tax plans call for the elimination of carried interest, an important tax policy for private equity investors. During the debate, he repeated that call.
But that is old news.
During the debate Trump warned viewers — over 100 million of them according to projections, rivaling the Super Bowl — that the U.S. economy is in a bubble. "A big fat ugly bubble" is how he put it.
When interest rates rise, "we will see some very bad things happen," he warned.
