Donald Trump may like to hire Cabinet members from Goldman Sachs, but it’s unlikely that any of them, in their right minds, would have ever conducted business with the guy. For the past two decades, Trump’s lender of choice has largely been Deutsche Bank. In 1998, when Trump was radioactive on Wall Street following a series of corporate bankruptcies, the big German bank agreed to lend the Trump Organization $125 million. According to The New York Times, Deutsche was ultimately involved in loaning Trump more than $2.5 billion. But executives reached the limits of their risk tolerance when Trump asked for another cash infusion in early 2016, in the middle of his presidential campaign. Senior officials were in a bind. They worried that if Trump won the election but defaulted on the loan, they might be forced to decide between seizing the president’s assets or refinancing—which might be seen as a bribe. They turned Trump down.

But, of course, Deutsche already had sizable Trump loans on the books—necessitating another series of awkward conversations. As Bloomberg reported earlier this week, top executives at Deutsche Bank were so concerned that Trump might default on a series of loans, totaling roughly $340 million, while he was in office that they discussed extending the repayment dates on the loans—originally due in 2023 and 2024—until after 2025, when he would have finished a hypothetical second term.

In the end, according to Bloomberg, the bank’s senior executives opted not to restructure the loans or do any new business with the sitting president. If true, this would be a major blow to the Trump Organization, which recently postponed expansion plans, and its ongoing commercial aspirations, because few other Wall Street banks have been willing to do business with Trump. Without Deutsche, it is no longer clear where the Trump Organization will get the money it wants, and needs, to continue to expand and to market the company’s real-estate products. (Eric Trump, who called the Bloomberg story “complete nonsense,” suggested that the company does not need any loans because it is comparatively under-leveraged for the real-estate industry.)

Questions about these particular loans have been circulating around Wall Street for months, but the actual facts about them are frustratingly difficult to unearth. Deutsche Bank isn’t talking, nor is Trump, despite his ongoing entreaties to journalists to call him for comment. (Yeah, right.) But, according to one ex-Deutsche Bank executive with whom I speak occasionally, the bank has been genuinely concerned about whether Trump would default on the loans, and what to do about that default.

Either possibility would be a public-relations nightmare. On the one hand, if Trump defaulted and Deutsche Bank did nothing, that might be viewed as a big gift to a sitting president of the United States. Would Deutsche Bank be seen as trying to influence Trump, or somehow be attempting to get favorable treatment from one of the long arms of the government—such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department, or even the Federal Reserve—with which it has regular interactions? On the other hand, if Deutsche moved to collect the loan, Trump might have various levers to exact his own retribution. My ex-Deutsche Bank source told me that this is something the bank is particularly afraid of at the moment, given how much regulatory hot water it has been in over the years for a variety of reasons.

Still, even if the bank were to extend the maturity of the loans until after 2025, as the Bloomberg article suggested was being contemplated, that would also benefit Trump. The finance principle here is known as net present value. In short, if you give a borrower a two-year extension on a loan that was due to be repaid in 2023, the new arrangement is worth less to the bank—and more to the borrower—than the original. “In the business, we say that’s ‘extend and pretend,’” my source said about extending the maturity of a loan, and hoping the added time improves the odds that the borrower pays up.

Trump, as he likes to tell us, claims to have graduated at the top of his class from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (the less prestigious undergraduate program, not the business school). He’s “like, really smart,” he has said. One apparent hole in his intelligence, though, has to do with how loans work. Once, in the lawsuit he brought against author Tim O’Brien for claiming that Trump inflated his net worth, the future president was asked if he understood the meaning of “net present value.” The topic came up during the deposition when attorneys inquired of Trump how he valued his golf courses. After conceding that he was only “modestly” familiar with the idea of “net present value,” he said it had something to do with “the value of the land currently after debt,” which sounds more like a definition of the equity value of an asset.

But, my ex-Deutsche Bank source said, Trump would know that he was getting a benefit if Deutsche Bank were to amend or to extend the loans. “He’s not dumb,” this person said. “He knows what’s a good thing for him, and what’s not a good thing for him and his finances.”

Deutsche Bank isn’t dumb either, although sometimes it seems to do dumb things (like lend Trump money even after he sued them for $3 billion). In the end, according to the Bloomberg article, the bank’s executives decided to do nothing—to neither amend the maturity date of the loans, nor to move to foreclose on them because of a potential default. In essence, they kicked the can down the proverbial road, leaving us once again with more unanswered questions. “What actually happened?” my source wondered. “What’s the end result? Are the loans still on the books? Did the thing get written off? Is it still there?”

All good questions, and ones without answers at the moment. Perhaps Maxine Waters, the new chair of the House Financial Services Committee, will ask these questions when she holds her “many hearings” on Capitol Hill, as she once promised to do.

Correction: This article previous misstated that the arm of Deutsche Bank that issued the loan to Trump. It was not DWS, as previously stated.

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