“IT’S about time that this country had somebody running it that has an idea about money,” Donald Trump said during the presidential debate on September 26th. Yet Mr Trump’s finances are the murkiest of any candidate in memory. He makes the Clintons look like paragons, and also makes a mockery of disclosure rules for candidates.

There are four problems. First, Mr Trump’s business is baffling. There is no holding company with accounts, and no major part of it has been publicly listed for long. Mr Trump has made a 104-page declaration of wealth to the electoral authorities. But the rules governing these forms are hopeless—they do not distinguish between revenue and profit, and any asset worth over $50m need not have its precise value specified. Mr Trump says he is worth $10 billion. An analysis by The Economist in February suggested $4 billion, but without audited accounts, who knows? The same forms show that Hillary Clinton is worth $11m-53m. This appears to exclude property and, perhaps, some of Bill’s assets.

Second, Mr Trump has not made public his tax returns. During the debate he again claimed that he is unable to because the Internal Revenue Service is auditing him, but the IRS says he is free to reveal what he likes. His reticence may be because he has paid little tax (the Clintons have paid a rate of 37-46% over the past decade). But he may also be nervous because the tax returns will show that he is fibbing about how rich he is. It seems impossible to establish the truth.

The third problem is that unethical conduct may have taken place within Mr Trump’s realm. Accusations of dubious behaviour abound, from casino deals and defaults in Atlantic City, to the fate of students at the failed Trump University. This month the Washington Post reported that Mr Trump’s small foundation used $258,000 of donors’ cash to settle his commercial legal disputes. Mr Trump’s spokesman says the report is “peppered with inaccuracies and omissions”.

Finally, it is unclear how financial conflicts of interest would be managed by a President Trump. He wants to put his business friends into his cabinet. By convention businessmen-turned-politicians put their activities into blind trusts, as Ross Perot promised to in 1992 and 1996. But Mr Trump has indicated that any trust would be run by his children, who are involved in his campaign.

The complete absence of a boundary in Mr Trump’s mind between politics and profit was shown during the debate, when he gave a thinly disguised plug for one of his new hotels. Perhaps, if he wins, he will shift America’s seat of government from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, to Trump Tower at 725 Fifth Avenue, New York.