The Story of Bain Capital and Mitt Romney

David Stockman is hardly a radical leftist, He was budget director from 1981-1985 for President Ronald Reagan, when he left the White House because he knew Reaganomics wasn't working. He also spent a lot of time in the private equity business, the same thing Mitt Romney was doing at Bain Capital.

Check out this article at The Daily Beast by Stockman. He eviscerates the myth Romney pushes that because of his business experience he knows what to do to get the economy going better than Obama. Stockman answers:

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 way—out 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 resale—the faster the better.

This was Mitt's business model. What were his results?

Accordingly, Bain’s returns on the overwhelming bulk of the deals—67 out of 77—were actually lower than what a passive S&P 500 indexer would have earned even without the risk of leverage or paying all the private-equity fees. Investor profits amounted to a prosaic 0.7X the original investment on these deals and, based on its average five-year holding period, the annual return would have computed to about 12 percent—well below the 17 percent average return on the S&P in this period.

By contrast, the 10 home runs generated profits of $1.8 billion on investments of only $250 million, yielding a spectacular return of 7X investment. Yet it is this handful of home runs that both make the Romney investment legend and also seal the indictment: they show that Bain Capital was a vehicle for leveraged speculation that was gifted immeasurably by the Greenspan bubble. It was a fortunate place where leverage got lucky, not a higher form of capitalist endeavor or training school for presidential aspirants. [Emphasis mine]

Then Stockman goes on,

The startling fact is that four of the 10 Bain Capital home runs ended up in bankruptcy, and for an obvious reason: Bain got its money out at the top of the Greenspan boom in the late 1990s and then these companies hit the wall during the 2000-02 downturn, weighed down by the massive load of debt Bain had bequeathed them. In fact, nearly $600 million, or one third of the profits earned by the home-run companies, had been extracted from the hide of these four eventual debt zombies.

He goes on to describe a number of Bain deals. My takeaway is this: Mitt Romney was not your classic capitalist. Someone with a good idea for a product that brings it to market and makes boucou bucks. He's no Steve Jobs. Mitt Romney practiced a form of vulture or parasitic capitalism, all designed to channel tens of millions to his personal wealth. There was never any regard for the workers (and their lives) of the companies he trashed.

How could this man have any idea what it takes if the goal is increased number of good paying jobs in America?