My it's Diane, on my mind, Donald Trump's cash crunch. The former president owes the state of New York almost half a billion dollars in fines.

This stems from a civil fraud suit that found Trump organization engaged in a decade long conspiracy,

lying about the value of their assets.

A deadline to pay is looming, but as lawyers say he doesn't have the cash.

This comes on top of a 91.6 million dollar fine in the E. Jean Carroll case that he posted earlier this month.

His lawyers and he himself had been very glad about saying,

oh, of course we can afford it, easy peasy,

I'm super rich.

It turns out he obviously doesn't have anything like that.

That Edward Luce, you asS. editor and columnist for the Financial Times.

He joined me Thursday morning to talk about Trump's finances and what these penalties could mean for him and his candidacy.

Ed, give us the background on this. How did Donald Trump come to the state of New York nearly a half

a billion dollars? Billion with a be? Now it's billion with the beat.

Well, this was the result of this long-standing case that

that Tisha James picked up as New York's attorney general

from Saivans on his alleged, well now proven, systematic inflation of his values

to creditors to creditors like Deutsche Bank, many lenders in order to get more favourable terms on his loans.

And so the damages that he was asked to pay are quite large in

reflection of the systematic long-term historic massive inflation of his values and the irony here of course is that having

had damages leveled on him for inflating his assets he now doesn't have the assets to pay those damages.

So there are ironies within ironies, but that one's supreme.

So explain why it is that Trump has to come up with the money now.

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