Donald Trump counseled Trump University students to take advantage of the housing bubble as an investment opportunity and said, just a year before it burst, that he was “excited” for it to end because of the money he’d make, NBCNews reports.
“People have been talking about the end of the cycle for 12 years, and I’m excited if it is,’ he told the Globe and Mail in March of 2007. “I’ve always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.”
At that time, the housing market was already beginning to decline, and just over a year later the subprime mortgage crisis hit, part of a chain reaction of events that led to the stock market crash of 2008 and cemented the Great Recession.
The subprime mortgage crisis alone caused millions of Americans to lose their homes, but that same Globe and Mail piece reports Trump was “advising investors that their are now great deals in buying subprime mortgages at a discount, and repossessed houses at low prices.”
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