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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMitt Romney:The Great Deformer
Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagans budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims.
Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bains billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.
Mitt Romney was not a businessman; He was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. (Charles Ommanney / Getty Images)
Nevertheless, Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaigns narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bains returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the casereal-world validation that Romney not only was a striking business success but also has been uniquely trained and seasoned for the task of restarting the nations sputtering engines of capitalism.
Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned wayout of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn roll-ups, and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resalethe faster the better.
That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldnt be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged systema regime of crony capitalismwhere the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.
So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise. I know this from 17 years of experience doing leveraged buyouts at one of the pioneering private-equity houses, Blackstone, and then my own firm. I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.
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