Of course, no one suffered any harm as a result of these over-valuations. Banks don’t lend tens of millions of dollars on the basis of an itemization of net worth by the borrower. And to say that this is an instance of selective law enforcement is an understatement. I suppose in the last ten years, residents of New York State have supplied banks with statements of financial condition more than a million times. Based on my own experience, a considerable portion of these statements over-valued the borrower’s assets. Has New York’s Attorney General brought a comparable charge against a single New York resident, other than Donald Trump? I doubt it.

Further, while square footage obviously is fixed, the value of commercial real estate is not. Such values often can only be speculated about until a sale actually takes place. And real estate values are volatile: if you were to look at statements of net worth created by developers and owners of commercial real estate in, say, 2019, and compare them against market values for those properties today, you would find, with hindsight, that many or most had been significantly over-valued. And of all the participants in the commercial real estate market, developers’ measures of net worth are the most slippery.