Romney has attacked President Obama for supporting government involvement in the economy over sheer free-markets. As Bloomberg News noted:
On the campaign trail, the presumptive Republican nominee has hammered at PresidentBarack Obama for favoring an unhealthy government role in the economy.
“When government, rather than the market, routinely selects winners or losers, or puts its hands on the scales of justice then enterprises and entrepreneurs can’t predict their prospects,” Romney said in a March 19 speech at the University of Chicago.
http://www.bloomberg.com/...
But this is just hypocrisy in a long list of hypocrisies from Romney. Today the
HuffPost has uncovered that:
The latest example comes from Rolling Stone, which in its Sept. 13 issue tells how the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. ended up footing a bill of at least $10 million in bailing out Bain & Co., the consulting firm that spawned the private-equity firm Bain Capital. The story is based partly on documents the magazine received under the Freedom of Information Act. It will probably get a lot less attention than Matt Taibbi's cover opus on Romney in the same issue, but is no less interesting.
Bain & Co. got into deep financial trouble in the late 1980s, partly because the founding partners of Bain Capital had stripped it of cash and saddled it with debt. But since the personal reputation of Romney was so tied to the fate of the Bain & Co, he jumped back into the company in 1990, after six years as CEO of Bain Capital.
Eventually one of the creditors that helped Romney out was the FDIC, and RS notes that the costs were most likely borne by the bank customers in the form of higher fees
In that time, he refused to let the company simply slip into bankruptcy,RS claims, reportedly inspiring a frustrated Goldman Sachs banker to tell Romney to "go fuck" himself.
Ultimately, Romney managed to convince Bain's creditors to take a steep discount on Bain debt, using a threat to pay Bain executives big bonuses that would have stripped it of the cash it had left, leaving creditors with next to nothing, according toRolling Stone.
One of those creditors was the FDIC, which had taken over a bank that loaned money to Bain. The FDIC ended up collecting about $14 million of the $30 million Bain owed it, according to the magazine. Taxpayers didn't foot the bill for this, FDIC banks did, but RS points out that those costs were in turn probably absorbed by bank customers in the form of higher fees.
Bloomberg also notes that:
The public-private agreements, which began in the first decade of Romney’s tenure as CEO, show that government played a supporting role in establishing Bain as among the nation’s most successful private equity firms and enabling him to accumulate a fortune his campaign says could reach $250 million
So next time Republicans tell you they built this, know that they chose a candidate who didn’t.
I should point out that the RollingStone piece on this is seperate from Taibbi's piece. This piece was written by Tim Dickinson and it can be read here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/...