Concerning That Gigantic Trump Bank Fraud Verdict

I don't really have any strong opinions on it, but I do have a strong opinion on one of the defenses deployed by Trump and by some misguided advocates (including at least some libertarians) against it.

That defense, in libertarian terms, is "no victim, no crime." Or, in detail, "the loans were repaid, the banks didn't lose money, therefore no victim and thus no damages."

That particular defense is 100%, unalloyed, puredee (yes, that's a real word) horseshit. Here's why:

• Banks base their lending decisions on, among other things, the value of collateral. Not just decisions to loan or not loan, but decisions on how much interest to charge, whether to require additional collateral, etc. By lying about the value (and in at least one case the composition -- he described a 10,000 square foot apartment as a 30,000 square foot apartment) of the collateral, Trump damaged the banks by getting artificially lower interest rates and/or by artificially putting less encumbered collateral within their prospective collections purview (and thus making that collateral available for use in other prospective loan scams with themselves or other banks as prospective victims). 
• While bank reserve requirements are insanely loose -- banks can effectively loan huge amounts of money they don't have -- at the time the scams took place such reserve requirements did exist (they were reduced to zero during COVID, but the scams took place prior to 2019). Which means there was some marginal amount of money that other people were prevented from borrowing because Trump fraudulently borrowed it. Those defrauded prospective borrowers were not presented as victims in the case, but they were.

Was the verdict too large? Too small? Politically motivated rather than based on the facts of the case? I can see arguments for all those claims. But the claim that there were no victims doesn't pass the laugh test.