Rolling Stone AGAIN! Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney

The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney likes to say he won't "apologize" for his success in business. But what he never says is "thank you" – to the American people – for the federal bailout of Bain & Company that made so much of his outsize wealth possible.

According to the candidate's mythology, Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began. When The Boston Globe reported on the rescue at the time of his Senate run against Ted Kennedy, campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company."

In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie.

The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that

Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.

With his selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has made fiscal stewardship the centerpiece of his campaign. A banner at MittRomney.com declared, "We have a moral responsibility not to spend more than we take in." Romney also opposed the federal bailout for Detroit automakers, famously arguing that the industry should be forced into bankruptcy. Government bailouts, he insists, are "the wrong way to go."

More: Romney Is Lying. Again.

But the FDIC documents on the Bain deal – which were heavily redacted by the firm prior to release – show that as a wealthy businessman, Romney was willing to go to extremes to secure a federal bailout to serve his own interests. He had a lot at stake, both financially and politically. Had Bain & Company collapsed, insiders say, it would have dealt a grave setback to Bain Capital, where Romney went on to build a personal fortune valued at as much as $250 million. It would also have short-circuited his political career before it began, tagging Romney as a failed businessman unable to rescue his own firm.

"None of us wanted to see Bain be the laughingstock of the business world," recalls a longtime Romney lieutenant who asked not to be identified. "But Mitt's reputation was on the line."

Mitt Romney's Federal Bailout: The Documents

The trouble began in 1984, when Bain & Company spun off Bain Capital to engage in leveraged buyouts and put Romney in charge of the new operation. To free up money to invest in the new business, founder Bill Bain and his partners cashed out much of their stock in the consulting firm – leaving it saddled with about $200 million in debt. (Romney, though not a founder, reportedly profited from the deal.) "People will tell you that Bill raped the place clean, was greedy, didn't know when to stop," a former Bain consultant later conceded. "Did they take too much out of the firm? You bet."

The FDIC documents make clear what happened next: "Soon after the founders sold their equity," analysts reported, "business began to drop off." First came scandal: In the late 1980s, a Bain consultant became a key figure in an illegal stock manipulation scheme in London. The firm's reputation took a hit, and it fired 10 percent of its consulting force. By the time the 1989 recession began, Bain & Company found itself going broke fast. Cash flows weren't enough to service the debt imposed by the founders, and the firm could barely make payroll. In a panic, Bill Bain tapped Romney, his longtime protégé, to take the reins.

In Romney's own retelling, he casts himself as a selfless and loyal company man. "There was no upside," he told his cheerleading biographer Hugh Hewitt in 2007. "There was no particular reason to do it other than a sense of obligation and duty to an organization that had done great things for me."

In fact, Romney had a direct stake in the survival of Bain & Company: He had been working to build the Bain brand his entire career, and felt he had to save the firm at all costs. After all, Bain sold top-dollar strategic advice to big businesses about how to protect themselves from going bust. If Bain & Company went bankrupt, recalls the Romney deputy, "anyone associated with them would have looked clownish." Indeed, when a banker from Goldman Sachs urged Bain to consider bankruptcy as the obvious solution to the firm's woes, Romney's desperation began to show. He flatly refused to discuss it – and in the ensuing argument, one witness says, Romney almost ended up in a brawl when the Goldman banker advised him to "go fuck yourself." :lol For the sake of Romney's career and fortune, bankruptcy was simply not an option – no matter who got screwed in the process.

According to the government records obtained by Rolling Stone, Bain & Company "defaulted on its debt obligations" at nearly the same time that "W. Mitt Romney . . . stepped in as managing director (and later chief executive) in 1990 and led the financial restructuring intended to get the firm back on track."

Romney moved decisively, and his early efforts appeared promising. He persuaded the founders to return $25 million of the cash they had raided from Bain & Company and forgive $75 million in debt, in return for protection from most future liabilities. Romney then consolidated Bain's massive debts into a single, binding loan agreement with four banks, which received liens on Bain's assets and agreed to delay repayments on the firm's debts for two years. The federal government also signed off on the deal, since the FDIC had recently taken control of a bank that was owed $30.6 million by Bain. Romney assured creditors that the restructuring would enable Bain to "operate normally, compensate its professionals competitively" and, ultimately, pay off its debts.

Almost as soon as the FDIC agreed to the loan restructuring, however, Romney's rescue plan began to fall apart. "The company realized early on that it would be unable to hit its revenue targets or manage the debt structure," the documents reveal. By the spring of 1992, Bain's decline was perilous: "If Bain goes into default," one analyst warned the FDIC, "the bank group will need to decide whether to force Bain into bankruptcy."

With his rescue plan a bust, Romney was forced to slink back to the banks to negotiate a new round of debt relief. There was only one catch: Even though Bain & Company was deep in debt and sinking fast, the firm was actually flush with cash – most of it from the looted money that Bill Bain and other partners had given back. "Liquidity is strong based on the significant cash balance which Bain is carrying," one federal document reads.

Under normal circumstances, such ample reserves would have made liquidating Bain an attractive option: Creditors could simply divvy up the stockpiled cash and be done with the troubled firm. But Bain had inserted a poison pill in its loan agreement with the banks: Instead of being required to use its cash to pay back the firm's creditors, the money could be pocketed by Bain executives in the form of fat bonuses – starting with VPs making $200,000 and up. "The company can deplete its cash balances by making officer-bonus payments," the FDIC lamented, "and still be in compliance with the loan documents."

What's more, the bonus loophole gave Romney a perverse form of leverage: If the banks and the FDIC didn't give in to his demands and forgive much of Bain's debts, Romney would raid the firm's coffers, pushing it into the very bankruptcy that the loan agreement had been intended to avert. The losers in this game would not only be Bain's creditors – including the federal government – but the firm's nearly 1,000 employees worldwide.

In March 1992, according to the FDIC documents, Romney approached the banks and played the bonus card. Allow Bain to pay off its debt at a deep discount, he demanded – just 35 cents on the dollar. Otherwise, the "majority" of the firm's "excess cash" would "be available for the bonus pool to its officers at a vice president level and above."

The next month, when the banks balked at the deal, Romney decided to prove he wasn't bluffing. "As the bank group did not accept the proposal from Bain," the records show, "Bain's senior management has decided to go forth with the distribution of bonuses." (Bain's lawyers redacted the amount of the executive payouts, and the Romney campaign refused to comment on whether Romney himself received a bonus.)

Romney's decision to place executive compensation over fiscal responsibility immediately put Bain on the ropes. By that July, FDIC analysts reported, Bain had so little money left that "the company will actually run out of cash and default on the existing debt structure" as early as 1995. If that happened, Bain employees and American consumers would take the hit – an alternative that analysts considered "catastrophic."

But Romney didn't dole out all of Bain's cash as bonuses right away. According to a record from May 1992, he set aside some of the money to put one last squeeze on the firm's creditors. Romney now demanded that the banks and the government agree to a deal that was even less favorable than the last – to retire Bain's debts "at a price up to but not exceeding 30 cents on the dollar."

The FDIC considered finding a buyer to take over its loans to Bain, but analysts concluded that "Bain has no value as a going concern." And the government wasn't likely to get much out of Bain if it allowed the firm to go bankrupt: The loan agreement engineered by Romney had left the FDIC "virtually unsecured" on the $30.6 million it was owed by Bain. "Once bonuses are paid," the analysts warned, "all members of the bank group believe this company will dissolve during 1993."

About the only assets left would be Bain's office equipment. The records show FDIC analysts pathetically attempting to assess the value of such items, including an HP LaserJet printer, before concluding that most of the gear was so old that the government's "portion of any liquidation proceeds would be negligible."

How had Romney scored such a favorable deal at the FDIC's expense? It didn't hurt that he had close ties to the agency – the kind of "crony capitalism" he now decries. A month before he closed the 1991 loan agreement, Romney promoted a former FDIC bank examiner to become a senior executive at Bain. He also had pull at the top: FDIC chairman Bill Seidman, who had served as finance chair for Romney's father when he ran for president in 1968.

The federal documents also reveal that, contrary to Romney's claim that he returned full time to Bain Capital in 1992, he remained involved in bailout negotiations to the very end. In a letter dated March 23rd, 1993, Romney reassured creditors that his latest scheme would return Bain & Company to "long-term financial stability." That same month, Romney once again threatened to "pay out maximum bonus distributions" to top executives unless much of Bain's debt was erased.

In the end, the government surrendered. At the time, The Boston Globe cited bankers dismissing the bailout as "relatively routine" – but the federal documents reveal it was anything but. The FDIC agreed to accept nearly $5 million in cash to retire $15 million in Bain's debt – an immediate government bailout of $10 million. All told, the FDIC estimated it would recoup just $14 million of the $30 million that Romney's firm owed the government.

It was a raw deal – but Romney's threat to loot his own firm had left the government with no other choice. If the FDIC had pushed Bain into bankruptcy, the records reveal, the agency would have recouped just $3.56 million from the firm.

The Romney campaign refused to respond to questions for this article; a spokeswoman said only that "Mitt Romney turned around Bain & Company by getting all parties to come to the table and make difficult decisions." But while taxpayers did not finance the bailout, the debt forgiven by the government was booked as a loss to the FDIC – and then recouped through higher insurance premiums from banks. And banks, of course, are notorious for finding ways to pass their costs along to customers, usually in the form of higher fees. Thanks to the nature of the market, in other words, the bailout negotiated by Romney ultimately wound up being paid by the American people.

Even as consumers took a loss, however, a small group of investors wound up getting a good deal in the bailout. Bain Capital – the very firm that had triggered the crisis in the first place – walked away with $4 million.

That was the fee it charged Bain & Company for loaning the consulting firm the services of its chief executive – one Willard Mitt Romney.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...829?print=true

That's how the corrupt, smash-mouth financial sector rolls. :lol

and Gecko is a fucking liar as well as a FELONY tax cheat. Trust this asshole with running the Exec branch? FUCK NO!

Anybody wonder why Gecko has secreted/destroyed his governor, Olympic records AND hides his tax returns. He's a fucking crook.

Have there been any accurate Rolling Stones articles to date posted here/

WC says it's inaccurate, article destroyed! :lol

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

WC says it's inaccurate, article destroyed! :lol

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Most all your articles fit that catagory. I seldom even read them any more. Mini-Moore.

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Have there been any accurate Rolling Stones articles to date posted here/

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Say what you will about their politics, Rolling Stone, produces some of the best investigative journalism in all print media IMO...something the media is sorely deficient in these days.

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Originally Posted by Th'Pusher

Say what you will about their politics, Rolling Stone, produces some of the best investigative journalism in all print media IMO...something the media is sorely deficient in these days.

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Their spin is just alternative. It's still spin.

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Their spin is just alternative. It's still spin.

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There is some spin, but there is some really good investigative journalism.

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Originally Posted by Th'Pusher

There is some spin, but there is some really good investigative journalism.

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Like Michael Moore does?

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Like Michael Moore does?

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No. Investigative journalism.

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Originally Posted by Th'Pusher

No. Investigative journalism.

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LOL...

Really?

I don't think there are any left in the world today. Especially on the left.

Lars Larson is the last one I know of, but he stopped doing investigative journalism about 20 years ago.

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F-bombs aside, the problem with Rolling Stone's report is that it's misleading about who, exactly, paid for the Bain bailout.



Essentially, here's what happened at Bain & Company in the early nineties. As a consulting firm that relied on corporations having enough money to hire them for important and lucrative projects, Bain was hurt badly by the stock market crash of 1987. In addition, there were some scandals at the company, and a heavy debt load that became harder to service as business dried up.



Romney, who was running Bain Capital at the time, was called back home to Bain & Company to play Mr. Fix-It and get the company out of debt. So he restructured Bain's debt, and renegotiated contracts with its creditors. One of those contracts was an IOU for roughly $30 million, which Bain owed to a failing bank that had been taken over by a government agency known as the FDIC.



In renegotiating Bain's agreement with the FDIC, it appears that Romney played hardball, threatening to pay out millions of dollars in Bain's cash to executives in the form of bonuses to top firm executives unless the FDIC agreed to forgive the firm's debt.



If you're Dickinson, this looks like "a perverse form of leverage" employed by Romney that, in the end, led to Bain getting a cozy bailout that "wound up being paid by the American people."



Here's the sticky point: Bain's debt negotiation was nothing like the taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailouts of 2008 and 2009. In fact, it wasn't funded by taxpayers at all.

It's confusing, because the FDIC is a government agency. And government agencies tend to be funded by taxpayers. But the FDIC is a special case. Essentially, it's a bank guarantor that is funded by the banks it guarantees. Every year, banks write a proverbial check to the FDIC for the equivalent of life insurance, and in return, the FDIC promises to backstop them if they're ever about to go out of business. The agency gets no funding — as in, zero dollars — from the government's coffers.



So while Romney's deal may have been unseemly (Dickinson points out that the FDIC chairman at the time was an adviser to George Romney during his 1968 run for president), it didn't screw taxpayers, at least directly.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/did-mitt-romney-get-bailed-out-at-bain.html

^^^ more spin from the uber liberal media!

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Like Michael Moore does?

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Originally Posted by Th'Pusher

No. Investigative journalism.

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LOL...

Tim Dickinson is just another libtard abusing the title of journalist for political reasons. What do you think of the piece WH just posted? Still think he is an Investigative Journalist? How could he miss such blatant facts? He is either incompetent, or a liar for the left.

NY Mag is not exactly a bastion of rock-ribbed conservatism, WC . . .

. . . and the optics are still horrible

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Originally Posted by Winehole23

NY Mag is not exactly a bastion of rock-ribbed conservatism, WC . . .

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I didn't say it was, but it puts Dickinson in league with Moore.

"in a league," I think you mean . . .

The FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

Like the FED, created by bankers!, as the lender of last resort to banks, FDIC is a key part of the Repug-hated, too-big-govt, was an innovation by the VRWC-hated FDR in the 1930s to restore confidence in the hated banks after the UNregulated financial sector went belly up in the 1929 bubble burst (which btw was made MUCH WORSE by the VRWC-adored Repug businessman Herbert Hoover).

The financial-sector-hated FDIC is funded by the financial sector, but the FDIC itself really IS BACKED BY TAXPAYERS.

FDIC nearly ran out of funds taking over, bailing out banks during the Banksters' Great Depression. FDIC is so hated the that the financial sector got rid of/harrassed/trashed Sheila Bair because she wanted MORE contributions from the financial sector to protect taxpayers' exposure to the financial sectors repeated, inevitable crises.

The NYMAG article does nothing change the fact that

The FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

yes, and bankers paid the money the FDIC used to do so. taxpayers weren't on the hook for it.

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

The FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

Like the FED, created by bankers!, as the lender of last resort to banks, FDIC is a key part of the Repug-hated, too-big-govt, was an innovation by the VRWC-hated FDR in the 1930s to restore confidence in the hated banks after the UNregulated financial sector went belly up in the 1929 bubble burst (which btw was made MUCH WORSE by the VRWC-adored Repug businessman Herbert Hoover).

The financial-sector-hated FDIC is funded by the financial sector, but the FDIC itself really IS BACKED BY TAXPAYERS.

FDIC nearly ran out of funds taking over, bailing out banks during the Banksters' Great Depression. FDIC is so hated the that the financial sector got rid of/harrassed/trashed Sheila Bair because she wanted MORE contributions from the financial sector to protect taxpayers' exposure to the financial sectors repeated, inevitable crises.

The NYMAG article does nothing change the fact that

The FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

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Did the Bain bailout exceed the FDIC's reserves to the point tax payer dollars were used?

I think not.

Insurance is insurance.

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Did the Bain bailout exceed the FDIC's reserves to the point tax payer dollars were used?

I think not.

Insurance is insurance.

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no, Bain's fuckup was huge to Gecko, but just peanuts compared to FDIC funding, but FDIC is still a BIG GOVT function and taxpayer backed. Keep spinning, you silly bitch.

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

no, Bain's fuckup was huge to Gecko, but just peanuts compared to FDIC funding, but FDIC is still a BIG GOVT function and taxpayer backed. Keep spinning, you silly bitch.

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LOL...

I think you just blew your top.

What's wrong? You are usually more mellow...

nah, my top is fine, thanks for your concern, you silly bitch.

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

nah, my top is fine, thanks for your concern, you silly bitch.

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LOL...

Whatever ShazBot.

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

LOL...

Whatever ShazBot.

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2nd posting:

The FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

Like the FED, created by bankers!, as the lender of last resort to banks, FDIC is a key part of the Repug-hated, too-big-govt, was an innovation by the VRWC-hated FDR in the 1930s to restore confidence in the hated banks after the UNregulated financial sector went belly up in the 1929 bubble burst (which btw was made MUCH WORSE by the VRWC-adored Repug businessman Herbert Hoover).

The financial-sector-hated FDIC is funded by the financial sector, but the FDIC itself really IS BACKED BY TAXPAYERS.

FDIC nearly ran out of funds taking over, bailing out banks during the Banksters' Great Depression. FDIC is so hated the that the financial sector got rid of/harrassed/trashed Sheila Bair because she wanted MORE contributions from the financial sector to protect taxpayers' exposure to the financial sectors repeated, inevitable crises.

The NYMAG article does nothing change the fact that

The FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

Quote:

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

2nd posting:

The FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

Like the FED, created by bankers!, as the lender of last resort to banks, FDIC is a key part of the Repug-hated, too-big-govt, was an innovation by the VRWC-hated FDR in the 1930s to restore confidence in the hated banks after the UNregulated financial sector went belly up in the 1929 bubble burst (which btw was made MUCH WORSE by the VRWC-adored Repug businessman Herbert Hoover).

The financial-sector-hated FDIC is funded by the financial sector, but the FDIC itself really IS BACKED BY TAXPAYERS.

FDIC nearly ran out of funds taking over, bailing out banks during the Banksters' Great Depression. FDIC is so hated the that the financial sector got rid of/harrassed/trashed Sheila Bair because she wanted MORE contributions from the financial sector to protect taxpayers' exposure to the financial sectors repeated, inevitable crises.

The NYMAG article does nothing change the fact that

The FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

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Can you at least spell Gekko correctly?

Another example of how PE scams the country with tax avoidance and tax evasion.


New York probes private equity tax strategy

At least a dozen U.S. private equity firms have been subpoenaed by the New York state attorney general as part of a probe into whether a widely used tax strategy that saved these firms hundreds of millions of dollars is proper,

the conversion of fees these private equity firms charge for managing investors' assets into fund investments

The practice is known as a "management fee waiver." As fund investments, the income would be taxed as capital gains, which attract rates around 15 percent. Without the conversion, the fees would be ordinary income, taxed at rates around 35 percent.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8800B620120902

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Originally Posted by Winehole23

yes, and bankers paid the money the FDIC used to do so. taxpayers weren't on the hook for it.

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tax payers are on the hook if the FDIC runs out of funds. The bankers incessantlhy bitch about financing the FDIC, iow, they want taxpayers to finance it.

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Did the Bain bailout exceed the FDIC's reserves to the point tax payer dollars were used?

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no, what Bain needed was peanuts compared to FDIC reserves. but just like taxpayers bailed out insurnace company AIG, they would bail out a underfunded FDIC.

And FDIC is still a GOVT AGENCY that bailed failed Gecko out.

BIG GOVT for the 1%, small govt for the 99%.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Can you at least spell Gekko correctly?

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bitch, can you a least get slapped like pussy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

bitch, can you a least get slapped like pussy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko

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Dumbfuck:

Gordon Gekko

so the movie mispelled it, artistic licence,

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

so the movie mispelled it, artistic licence,

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Are you referring to the lizard, or the fictional man?

Mispelled?

Gekko Family History and Genealogy

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Gekko Family Tree

Elaine Gekko (1930 - 2004) Portland, Multnomah County, OR (Oregon), 97230
Sam Gekko (1930 - 2004) Gardena, Los Angeles County, CA (California), 90247
Ryokichi Gekko (1891 - 1981) Madera, Madera County, California (California), 93637
Harry Gekko (1921 - 2004) Portland, Multnomah County, OR (Oregon), 97230
Shizuye Gekko (1901 - 1995) Madera, Madera County, CA (California), 93637
Emy Y Gekko (1930 - 2011) Gardena, Los Angeles County, California (California), 90247

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If you are saying they spelled the lizard wrong, think again:

Gekko Gecko

3rd posting

The FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

Like the FED, created by bankers!, as the lender of last resort to banks, FDIC is a key part of the Repug-hated, too-big-govt, was an innovation by the VRWC-hated FDR in the 1930s to restore confidence in the hated banks after the UNregulated financial sector went belly up in the 1929 bubble burst (which btw was made MUCH WORSE by the VRWC-adored Repug businessman Herbert Hoover).

The financial-sector-hated FDIC is funded by the financial sector, but the FDIC itself really IS BACKED BY TAXPAYERS.

FDIC nearly ran out of funds taking over, bailing out banks during the Banksters' Great Depression. FDIC is so hated the that the financial sector got rid of/harrassed/trashed Sheila Bair because she wanted MORE contributions from the financial sector to protect taxpayers' exposure to the financial sectors repeated, inevitable crises.

The NYMAG article does nothing change the fact that the FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

Quote:

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

3rd posting

The FDIC bailed out Gecko. PERIOD

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Yes, I get it. What I don't get is all your posting in 20011 and prior spelled Gekko correctly. A gekko is still a lizard if that's your point. I point out the correct spelling, yet true to your hard-headed nature, you refuse to correct it.

Taibbi inteview, same topic, more details, info

Matt Taibbi: The Secret to Mitt Romney’s Fortune? Greed, Debt and Forcing Others to Foot the Bill

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We are broadcasting from PBS station WEDU in Tampa, Florida. This is "Breaking With Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency," Democracy Now!'s special coverage from the Republican National Convention, inside and out. I'm Amy Goodman.

We continue our coverage now by turning to an issue that’s been raised repeatedly during the campaign: the personal wealth of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. A new article by reporter Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone sheds light on the origin of his fortune, revealing how Romney’s former firm, Bain Capital, used private equity to raise money to conduct corporate raids. Matt Taibbi writes, quote, "what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time," Taibbi writes. He goes on to say, "In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on [planet] Earth."

Well, Matt Taibbi joins us now, contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent in-depth piece called "Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital," author of the book also, Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.

Matt Taibbi, welcome to Democracy Now!

MATT TAIBBI: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Lay it out for us. Excellent piece, investigative piece, on Mitt Romney’s wealth. Where did it start?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, you know, for me, it started when I had to cover this campaign earlier this year, and I was listening to Romney’s stump speech about debt. You know, he came up with this whole image of a prairie fire of debt raging across America that was literally going to burn children alive in the future. And I kept thinking to myself, does nobody know what this guy did for a living and how he made his money? You know, Mitt Romney is unabashedly a leverage buyout artist. And a leverage buyout artist is a guy who borrows lots of money that other companies have to pay back. And that’s the simple formula.

He started out—his most famous deals, of course, are essentially venture capital deals like the Staples situation, where he built a company from the ground up. But after Staples, he switched to a different model, that he preferred for the rest of his professional career, in which he took over existing companies by putting down small amounts of his own cash, borrowing the rest from—typically from a giant investment bank, taking over controlling stakes in companies, and then forcing those companies to pay him either through management fees or through dividends. And that’s his business formula.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what private equity is.

MATT TAIBBI: Well, that is what a private equity fund does. They’re essentially—it’s a synonym for what in the '80s we called the leverage buyout business. It's a small group that raises capital and then goes and leverages takeovers of companies using borrowed money. In the '80s, these—this sort of business was glamorized through a couple of things, in particular, in pop culture. One was the movie Wall Street, where Gordon Gekko, the famous Michael Douglas character from the Oliver Stone movie, was essentially a private equity guy. He was a leverage buyout takeover artist. And the other one was a book called Barbarians at the Gate, which was a true story of the takeover of RJR Nabisco by a company called KKR, which was another Bain Capital-like takeover company. And that's what they are. They’re essentially guys who borrow money to take over companies and extract wealth from those companies to pay off their investors.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt, you say that Mitt Romney is not the flip-flopper that critics say he is.

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah. I mean, this is a sort of a subtle point about Mitt Romney. It’s funny. I don’t want to stretch this comparison too much, but, you know, there’s—it’s almost like he has a kind of a religious conviction about being able to lie to people outside of the tent, so to speak. You know, there’s that tenet of some forms of extreme Muslim religions where it’s OK to lie to the infidel. And I think Mitt Romney has a little bit of that. He seems to believe that it’s OK, that there’s nothing particularly wrong with changing one’s mind about things, and he does it repeatedly in a way that I think is different from other politicians. For him, it’s just changing a business strategy, and he doesn’t see why everybody should get so upset about it.

AMY GOODMAN: You say that Mitt Romney has a vision, that he’s trying for something big. Lay out what that vision is.

MATT TAIBBI: Well, Mitt Romney is really the representative of an entire movement that’s taken over the American business world in the last couple of decades. You know, America used to be—especially the American economy was built upon this brick-and-mortar industrial economy, where we had factories, we built stuff, and we sold it here in America, and we exported it all over the world. That manufacturing economy was the foundation for our wealth and power for a couple of centuries. And then, in the '80s, we started to transform ourselves from a manufacturing economy to a financial economy. And that process, which, you know, on Wall Street we call financialization, was really led that—sort of this revolution, where instead of making products, we made transactions, we made financial products, like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. We created money through financial transactions rather than building products and selling them around the world. And that revolution was really led by people like Mitt Romney. And the advantage of financialization, from the point of view of the very rich and the people who run the American economy, is that it was extremely efficient at extracting wealth and kicking it upward, whereas the old manufacturing economy had the sort of negative effect of spreading around to the entire population. In the financialization revolution, you can take all of the money, and you don't have to spread it around with anybody. And Mitt Romney was kind of a symbol of that fundamental shift in our economy.

AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, Democracy Now!'s Mike Burke caught up with the Texas governor, Rick Perry, and asked him about his comment about Mitt Romney, calling him a vulture capitalist. Let's take a listen.

MIKE BURKE: You described Mitt Romney, compared him to a vulture. What did you mean by that? And you said his work with Bain Capital was indefensible.

GOV. RICK PERRY: How are you?

MIKE BURKE: Those were your words during the primary season, Governor. Do you have any comment at all?

AMY GOODMAN: What you were just listening to was the silence of Governor Perry not responding to Mike’s question. Yes, Governor Perry called Mitt Romney a "vulture capitalist." Matt Taibbi, what does that mean?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, look, again, this is what—how companies like Bain made their money. And a great example was a company that I went and visited—well, the place where it used to exist—KB Toys, which used to be headquartered out in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. They took over the company with like $18 million down. They financed the other $302 million. So that’s borrowed money that subsequently became the debt of KB Toys. This is an important distinction for people to understand. When they borrowed that money to take over that company, they didn’t have to pay it back, KB had to pay it back. Once they took over the company, they induced it to do a $120 million, quote-unquote, "dividend recapitalization," which essentially means that the company had to cash in a bunch of shares and pay Bain and its investors a huge sum of money. And in order to finance that, they had to take out over $60 million in bank loans. So, essentially, you take over the company, you force them to make enormous withdrawals against their credit card, essentially, and pay the new owners of the company. And that’s essentially what they did. They took over a floundering company that was sort of in between and faced with threatening changes in the industry, and they forced them to cash out entirely and pay all their money to the new owners.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, just for the record, Governor Perry’s comment about Mitt Romney was very interesting. He said, "They’re vultures that sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick, and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that, and they leave the skeleton."

MATT TAIBBI: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly what they do. Again, they borrow money, they take over the company, the company now has this massive new debt burden. So, if the couple was already in trouble, if it was already having trouble meeting its bottom line, suddenly, not only does it have its old problems, now it has, you know, $300 million in new debt service that it has to pay. So it might be, you know, paying millions and millions of dollars every month.

A great example is Dunkin’ Donuts, whose parent company was taken over a couple years ago by a combination of Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group. Dunkin’ was induced to do one of those dividend recapitalizations. They had to pay half-a-billion dollars to their new masters. And just to pay the debt service on the loan they took out to make that payment to Bain and Carlyle, they’re going to have to sell like two-and-a-half million cups of coffee every month just to pay the debt service. So, that’s extraordinary. They are—they’re essentially vultures who hang out waiting for companies to get sick, then they forcibly take them over, and they extract fees, commissions and dividends, by force, essentially.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this week, Democracy Now! spoke to two workers from what’s now Sensata Technologies, which Bain Capital is majority owner. A hundred seventy workers there at the Sensata plant in Freeport, Illinois, are calling on Romney to help save their jobs from being shipped to China. The plant manufactures sensors and controls that are used in aircraft and automobiles. This is Tom Gaulrapp, a former—well, he’s a Sensata worker now, talking about the response that they’ve received.

TOM GAULRAPP: We’re there trying to save our jobs, and we were called communists. For trying to save our jobs from going to China from the United States, we were called communists. They—if there hadn’t been a large police group in there, I’m sure we would have been more threatened. They started this "U.S.A." chant. It’s like, yes, we’re all for the U.S.A., too. That’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to keep well-paying manufacturing jobs from being moved out of this country to China. And they make it sound like we’re not patriotic. And it boggles the mind as to what they’re thinking.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Tom Gaulrapp, and he’s describing going to an Iowa Romney campaign event last week—Romney was maybe seven rows in front of him—and asking about their jobs, their company owned by Bain, being sent to China. In fact, some of them went to China, the workers, to train the workers in China, so that they could take over their jobs. Their last day will be the Friday before the elections. They’ll be on the unemployment line to apply for unemployment on Monday. On Tuesday, they vote. Can you comment on this situation, Matt?

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, no, it’s absolutely typical of a private equity transaction. I think one of the glaring misconceptions about this kind of business that’s persisted throughout Mitt Romney’s campaign for the presidency is that what these companies do is turn around and fix companies, that they’re in the business of helping these companies. Romney constantly uses this term, that he—that, you know, "help." "I’m either helping this firm, or I’m helping it turn around." He wrote a book called Turnaround. But they are not in the business of turning companies around and creating jobs. That is a complete mischaracterization. What they’re in the business of doing is repaying the investors who lent them the money to take over those companies. The workers are completely irrelevant in this scheme.

Romney is—you know, the old-school industrialists, like Mitt Romney’s father, they were men and women who built communities. They had factory towns. They were very anxious to leave, you know, hard legacies that people could see: hospitals, churches, schools—you know, the Hersheys of the world, the Kelloggs. But these new owners have absolutely no allegiance to American workers, American places, American communities. Their only allegiance is to the investors and to themselves. And so, it’s not at all uncharacteristic to have these situations where people are pleading for their jobs or they’re saying, you know, "We’ll tighten our belts, if you just make this concession and keep us." That’s irrelevant to the Mitt Romney-slash-Bain Capital-slash-Carlyle Groups of the world. They’re entirely about making profits. And if that means shipping jobs to China or eliminating jobs, that’s what they’re going to do. And that’s the new generation of corporate owners in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt, last month, Mitt Romney gave a series of TV interviews defending his role at Bain Capital. This is Mitt Romney speaking to CNN’s Jim Acosta.

MITT ROMNEY: There’s nothing wrong with being associated with Bain Capital, of course. But the truth is that I left any role at Bain Capital in February of '99. And that's known and said by the people at the firm. It’s said by the documents, offering documents that the firm made subsequently about people investing in the firm. And I think anybody who knows that I was out full time running the Olympics would understand that’s where I was. I spent three years running the Olympic Games. And after that was over, we worked out our retirement program, our departure official program for Bain Capital, and handed over the shares I had. But there’s a difference between being a shareholder, an owner, if you will, and being a person who’s running an entity. And I had no role whatsoever in managing Bain Capital after February of 1999.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Mitt Romney on CNN. Matt Taibbi, he’s referring to the—that time gap, 1999, when he said he left, to 2000, 2001, 2002. The significance of this?

MATT TAIBBI: You know, I don’t think it’s terribly important whether he was actively sitting at the helm during that time or whether he was just passively accepting the vast amounts of money that were sent his way as the result of the deals that were concluded at that time. Again, Mitt Romney—well, I’m sorry, Bain Capital took over KB Toys during that disputed time period and made an enormous profit. I think their profit was something like $100 million out of that deal. And Mitt Romney shared in that, in that largesse, even whether he was, you know, actively strategizing or not. You know, the groundwork for deals like that had been laid in the decades before that where he was actively involved in deals like taking over a company like Ampad, which was a very similar deal to the KB deal. So, it’s irrelevant to me, and I think it should be irrelevant to everybody, whether he was actually working there or not. He shared in the profits and clearly didn’t have a problem with any of those deals.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Taibbi, you have said that Mitt Romney’s fortune would not have been possible without the direct assistance of the U.S. government.

MATT TAIBBI: Yes, there’s a tax deduction for all that borrowed money. So, when Mitt Romney or Bain Capital, when they want to go take over a company like KB Toys and they borrow $300 million to do it, and that new debt becomes the debt of KB Toys, when KB pays the debt service, the monthly service on that debt, that service is deductible. And if that were not true, if they did not have that deduction, these deals would not be economically feasible. They wouldn’t be possible. I spoke to one former regulator from the SEC, who worked both in the SEC and as an accountant at a Big Four accounting firm, and he reviewed a number of these deals in both a public and private capacity. And he said, without that deduction, he’s never seen a deal that would have been economically—a private equity deal that would have been economically feasible. So, this entire business model depends upon a tax break.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Romney’s role in Bealls Brothers and Palais Royal. And how is Michael Milken involved with this?

MATT TAIBBI: Sure. And just generally speaking, these private equity deals, they’re made possible by these sort of get-rich-quick, easy-money schemes that started appearing on Wall Street in the '80s. Again, in the old days, the real power in the American economy was—belonged to the industrialists, the guys who—men and women who actually made things, because they had—they were the primary sources of cash and revenue. But in the ’80s, we started to develop all these new methods of simply creating money out of thin air. And the first great one in the ’80s was Mike Milken's junk bonds. And this ability to conjure instant millions gave people, like the fictional Gordon Gekko, the power to take over, you know, mighty companies—airlines, you know, industrial companies—whereas 10, 15, 20 years ago, somebody who didn’t have his own fortune would never have been able to take over those companies.

And that’s what happened with this transaction with Bealls. Romney used Mike Milken’s junk bonds to take over a couple of department store chains, which he subsequently merged. And even after finding out that Milken was under investigation and would shortly have to go to court to defend himself on fraud charges, Romney pressed ahead with the deal anyway and ended up making, you know, another tidy profit on that deal.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt, finally, what do you feel reporters here at the Republican National Convention should be asking Mitt Romney about his time at Bain?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, I just think that the—

AMY GOODMAN: And what his plans are for the presidency?

MATT TAIBBI: Sure. I just think the one unanswered question that reporters just don’t ask either of these people is—they’re making their entire platform about debt. Paul Ryan, his entire political profile is based on this idea that he’s an enemy of debt and a, you know, budget slasher. And Mitt Romney has—again, he’s banked his entire campaign rhetoric on the sort of prairie fire of debt theme. And yet, this is a guy who spent—who made his fortune creating debt. Somehow, this question has not been asked to him. How is that not hypocritical? It hasn’t been asked of either of them, and I would like to see the mainstream press at least ask that question. I think it’s an ideal debate question that should be asked somewhere down the line


http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/3...itt#transcript

Romney's Success at Bain Capital: The Scam as Business Model

it is important to understand that Romney is not a successful businessman in the same way as others who have built successful companies.

But each of these people could take credit for building companies that produced wealth. That is not the case with Mitt Romney.

Private equity companies like Bain Capital are not primarily about producing wealth. They profit largely by siphoning off wealth created elsewhere in the economy. There are many different ways in which this diversion of wealth is accomplished.

The simplest and most common trick is gaming the tax code. It is absolutely standard practice for private equity firms to immediately load up the companies they acquire with debt. This has two benefits for the PE companies. First, it allows them to get most of their money back right away. They end up with a heavily leveraged company, where the PE company is still in control, but has little of its own money at risk.

The other benefit is that the interest on the debt, unlike dividends paid out to shareholders, is tax deductible. This means that even if the PE company does nothing to improve the operations of a company it acquires, it will increase its profitability by reducing its taxes.

Of course PE companies like Bain are likely to have more sophisticated tax avoidance strategies as well. As Romney said in a recent campaign speech, big companies know the tax tricks, small companies often are stuck paying the taxes they owe. This means there can be big profits by acquiring smaller companies and teaching them how to game the tax code.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/11316...business-model

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Have there been any accurate Rolling Stones articles to date posted here/

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They did a great article on Motley Crue a while ago. It was sometime after Vince Neil wrecked his car and killed Razzle. It was incredibly insightful.

Boutons once again put to shame by the truth. It must suck being such a ___teamer that you can't even see your own lies any more.

"Boutons once again put to shame by the truth"

You Lie

you wouldn't know the truth if it crawled up your nose

Quote:

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Originally Posted by cantthinkofanything

They did a great article on Motley Crue a while ago. It was sometime after Vince Neil wrecked his car and killed Razzle. It was incredibly insightful.

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Was it posted here?

after the excerpted, the author gives a point by point rebuttal, explaining what he thinks Taibbi got right and what he got wrong.

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Quote:

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Very few of my friends understand private equity, let alone care about it. But some of them wrote me this past weekend, after reading Matt Taibbi's new cover story for Rolling Stone about Mitt Romney's time with Bain Capital. For example, this was from my former college housemate Andrew:

I read the Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Reading it you can obviously see that the guy has a fairly biased opinion on private equity and Wall Street dealings in general. What's the industry's defense of PE? I assume the truth is somewhere between Mitt's verision of Bain as a massive jobs creator and Gordon Gekko-esque corporate raiders.

Andrew has good instincts. Taibbi took out the long knives for this one, which means he sacrificed a bit of accuracy for potency.


His overall thesis is correct: There is a fundamental hypocrisy in a former leveraged buyout investor railing against America's ballooning debt. Leveraged buyouts, by definition, add debt to a company's balance sheet -- weighing it down in the short-term so that it can (hopefully) thrive in the long-term. Romney defenders point out that America is not the same as a private equity-backed company, a truism that only goes to underscore the flimsiness of using Romney's Bain Capital experience as a singular qualification for the Oval Office.

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http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/...iid=SF_F_River

"weighing it down in the short-term so that it can (hopefully) thrive in the long-term"

fucking bullshit.

the cash from putting the victim company into debt is to pay off the PE investors, who don't GAF what happens to the company.

so emotional. so easily thrown off balance.

I'm a cold-blooded bitch slapper

http://www.guzer.com/pictures/darth_elmo.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Was it posted here?

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I think so.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

I'm a cold-blooded bitch slapper

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http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y64.../vaderfail.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Winehole23

after the excerpted, the author gives a point by point rebuttal, explaining what he thinks Taibbi got right and what he got wrong.

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http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/...iid=SF_F_River

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And Taibbi counters each of his counterpoints