Quarterly report shows squeeze at Trump casinos (Donald...your fired?)

[Nlighten1]

http://www.iht.com/articles/518564.html

Cash appears tight with debt payment due

Veteran gamblers know better than to bet against the house. But what if the house is owned by Donald Trump, whose cash-starved casino holdings are struggling to stay afloat?
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Trump is essentially placing a high-stakes bet that his casinos will generate enough cash over the next few weeks to make a $73.1 million debt payment due at the end of the month. It will be a tight squeeze, even for someone with Trump’s feline financial dexterity.
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Buried at the bottom of unaudited first-quarter earnings that Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts released last Friday was a sobering figure: $91.4 million, the amount of cash that two Trump casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, can tap to help meet that debt payment.
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That cash trove is not unencumbered, as would be typical at most publicly traded companies. New Jersey gambling regulators require casinos to keep a reserve known as ‘‘cage cash’’ to cover unexpected payouts to winning bettors and to provide cushion for tax payments and payroll. The cage cash reserve at the Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza, the two casinos responsible for this month’s debt payment, is about $50 million — meaning that only $41.4 million of the casinos’ cash can be applied to the $73.1 million tab.
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The rest of the debt will have to be paid out of the two casinos’ fresh cash flow, which averaged about $12 million a month between January and March. Before the Borgata casino opened in Atlantic City last year and began eating into Trump Hotels’ market share, the two casinos had free cash flow between April and June of about $18 million a month.
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So Trump Hotels — if it somehow manages to ante up all of its available cash, hands over the entirety of April and May’s cash flow, and dodges other unforeseen expenses for the rest of the month — will only have somewhere between $65 million and $77 million on hand in a few weeks when it has to pay off its $73.1 million obligation. Even the most reckless gamblers get queasy around these kinds of odds.
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Trump Hotels filed its earnings on Friday evening, an hour after the stock market closed and when most of Wall Street was already on its way home for the weekend. While the company’s filing crept in like the fog on little cat feet, its finances are hardly elusive. Trump’s company reported a first-quarter loss of nearly $49 million, about twice as much as it lost in the quarter a year earlier.
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Trump Hotels has sputtered along so weakly that has been unable to spend money upgrading its facilities to fend off the Borgata’s advance (though, as the company’s proxy filing on Friday showed, Trump still managed to pull down a $1.5 million salary last year).
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Of course, one way out of this mess is to find a friendly outsider with deep pockets. Trump is contemplating just that. He said he was willing to cede control of the company and his job as chief executive to secure a $400 million cash infusion from an investment bank, a deal that will get done only if the company’s wary and battered bondholders agree to it.
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A spokeswoman for New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement, which regulates the state’s casinos, monitors their finances, and sets cage cash guidelines, said the agency believes that Trump Hotels is ‘‘financially stable.’’
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Andrew Susser, an analyst at Banc of America Securities, said that he expects the company to make the debt payment but that it will need to draw upon April and May revenue to do so. ‘‘By withholding it, it shows immediately that they need to restructure and it is a carrot for bondholders,’’ she said. ‘‘The implicit threat is that if they don’t come to an agreement, the company would dissolve.’’
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Even if Trump Hotels has the cash to make its debt payment later this month, it still faces a bleak future because other coupon payments are due this fall and thereafter. Marvin Roffman, an analyst and longtime Trump critic, who correctly predicted the Trump Taj Majal’s 1991 bankruptcy, is once again gloomy about Trump’s prospects.
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‘‘He continues to see erosion in market share, his working capital is gone, and the interest-rate meter is starting to tick up,’’ Roffman said. ‘‘He is caught between a rock and a hard place. Now, he knows how his ‘apprentices’ feel.’’ The New York Times
.Cash appears tight with debt payment due

Veteran gamblers know better than to bet against the house. But what if the house is owned by Donald Trump, whose cash-starved casino holdings are struggling to stay afloat?
.
Trump is essentially placing a high-stakes bet that his casinos will generate enough cash over the next few weeks to make a $73.1 million debt payment due at the end of the month. It will be a tight squeeze, even for someone with Trump’s feline financial dexterity.
.
Buried at the bottom of unaudited first-quarter earnings that Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts released last Friday was a sobering figure: $91.4 million, the amount of cash that two Trump casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, can tap to help meet that debt payment.

[0007]

1. The only difference between junior and Donald Trump are the

crime cabals they front for.

[FlemingsGhost]

2. You might want to limit your post to 4 paragraphs

Dems the rules, I think.

:hi:

[Tellurian]

3. So, with Donald's $$$ he needs a write off! nt