Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank Trust Cos. Americas shelve suits to try to settle differences.

Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank Trust Cos. Americas announced Tuesday that they have temporarily suspended lawsuits filed against each other four months ago over Trump International Hotel and Tower’s finances and will try to settle their differences out of court, a move designed to allay concerns of potential buyers who are jittery about the Tower’s future in a morose real estate market.

“It certainly didn’t help,” Trump said of the lawsuits. “Now this totally resolves questions in anybody’s mind.”

While the project has seen a recent uptick in sales, both sides agreed that sidelining the lawsuits that generated headlines nationally would assist in marketing the 92-story tower at 401 N. Wabash Ave. The skyscraper is likely to be the last new high-rise in Chicago for some time, and Trump has lamented for months that restrictions put on him by a consortium of lenders led by Deutsche have thwarted his efforts to sell units in the trophy building.

Trump and Deutsche filed suits against each other in November. Trump first sued Deutsche and other lenders in New York State Supreme Court in Queens, seeking to excuse a repayment of more than $330 million due Nov. 7 and extend the $640 million construction loan for an unspecified amount of time. In that suit, Trump claimed that the global economic crisis was a “once-in-a-lifetime credit tsunami” affecting his ability to sell units at the Tower and repay the loan. He also sought $3 billion in damages. >more

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Wharton financial professor and author of The Stocks  for the Long Run, Professor Jeremy Siegel predicts the global economy will turn around by the second half of 2009. The most significant cause of the downturn, according to Siegel is that financial firms bought, held and insured large quantities of risky, mortgage-related assets on borrowed money.

Due to deliver a keynote address at the first-ever Wharton Global Alumni Forum to be held in the Middle East from March 11-12, 2009 in Dubai, Professor Siegel is an expert on macroeconomics, financial markets, long-run asset returns and demographics.

“During dot-com IPOs of the early 1990s, the firms that underwrote the stock offerings did not hold on to those stocks,” says Siegel as quoted on Knowledge@Wharton, the Wharton School’s journal of business analysis. “They flipped them. But in the case of mortgage-backed securities, the financial firms decided these were good assets to hold. That was their fatal flaw.” >more

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