There is a mini debate over how long Mitt Romney worked at Bain Capital. Reason being, while Bain did the usual nasty raider shit before Romney’s self reported departure in Feb 99, some of the more politically damaging activity occurred after. David Corn at Mother Jones makes a great point, opposing other orgs that side with the Romney campaign: in document after document, over 60 total, filed with the SEC and subject to penalty of perjury, Mitt Romney is named in one way or another as a principal well after the date in question:
MoJo — These rebuttals did not take into account all the evidence. For instance, neither one directly referred to those SEC filings—such as this May 10, 2001, document—that describe Romney as a member of the “management committee” of Bain funds. Perhaps he was a member in name only, but if so, wouldn’t he still bear some responsibility for these entities’ actions, especially when he was signing his name to their deals and reaping the benefits of ownership? (This particular filing notes that he and another member of the management committee controlled 1,376,377 shares of DDi, a manufacturer of circuit boards.)
And neither Primack nor FactCheck.org addressed the matter of Bain Capital NY. In 2001 and 2002, Romney filed Massachusetts state disclosure forms noting he was the 100 percent owner of this Bain venture. But Bain Capital NY was incorporated in Delaware on April 13, 1999—two months after Romney’s supposed retirement from the firm. Was Romney uninvolved with the incorporation of a new Bain entity—which only he owned—after his departure? Perhaps.
These and other revelations put Romney in the position of needing to have it both ways. On the one hand, Romney was a brilliant businessman, so successful in every aspect of private equity that his executive experience will transfer seamlessly to the White House. And yet, if we take the evidence and claims of the campaign at face value, he was little more than a silent befuddled partner who used to work at Bain and allowed his name to be signed right and left on dozens of legal documents as owner, in return for a big slice of the pie.
None of this sheds any light on how Romney came to own a $100 million IRA offshore, or the tax status and origin of his alleged Swiss and Bermuda banks accounts. The idea that what the US really needs on the heels of a massive economic collapse thanks to deregulation and shady offshore derivatives, is an investment banksta with expertise in sheltering deals and money from regulation and scrutiny, is absurd.
On the point in question, those two claims above are not easy to square, in fact they are mutually exclusive. And if that were an isolated incident this would be no big deal. But it’s not isolated. In what has become an all too familiar pattern, that about sums Romney up perfectly: there always seems to be an expedient version of Mittens to fit the political need du jure — pro-choice or anti-choice, pro-healthcare or anti-healthcare, for auto bail outs and against auto bailouts — and the latest model is always portrayed as the real one, regardless of what documented history and common sense point to.
Bain Capital made its money by acquiring profitable companies with other peoples’ money (this is called a hostile takeover). Once Bain had control, they would strip the company of all easily disposable assets, loot the pension fund if one existed, fire as many employees as possible, transfer the debt used to take over the company to the company, and sell the corpse for a pittance.
Basically Bain bet against workers and the stockholders of the looted company. Anyone who claims that Romney and Bain were doing anything to improve the economic health of the US is an economic illiterate.
Yeap Tis. Sadly, economic illiteracy is rampant.
Yeah.
I’m still trying to figure out how Romney ended up with a $100 million IRA in Bermuda. I don’t think it is going to appear on the internet. One expert said if they knew, everyone would be doing it.
I’d like to transfer mine there and bump it up to $1 million. No point being too unrealistic.
Lately, I’ve noticed a whole lot of people who never paid any attention to economics, paying lots of attention, scientists, MD’s and so on.
The endless Great Depression is effecting everyone. Most Americans are getting poorer, a recent article said household incomes are the lowest since the early 1990’s, a lost generation.
At some point, it starts being part of a survival course. How to survive the Tea Party Apocalypse.
Hi Tis!!!
If you are still on this thread, think the Euro will survive? We’ve talked about this before a while ago.
Oddly enough, I have read a lot on this.
I don’t see how it will have a future. All the countries in Europe are way too different. And they all have to pursue their own interests. Too much centrifical force.
Plus, it isn’t very sturdy. Greece is 2% of the Euro block. Greece managed to take the Euro down. I’m not seeing how a currency so fragile that a nowhere place like Greece (in economic terms, I’ve heard it is a really nice place to visit and been near there on the Med.) can take it down has any real chance of existing.
Make any sense here?
I know it’s not quite what you asked but let’s consider what happens if Greece leaves the eurozone either voluntarily or is pushed out. Bloomberg Businessweek doesn’t think it’ll happen anytime soon so I’m giving a hypothetical (but quite possible) scenario. Incidentally, in the financial world Greece leaving the eurozone is called “Grexit”, which lets you know people are thinking about the possibility.
First, Greece reestablishes the drachma and passes exchange rate laws. The move would declare that Greek currency is legal tender, and stipulates conversion rates on assets. Greece would also have to pass laws preventing outflow of capital. Greece’s banks have already witnessed severe capital flight and that’s only likely to continue in the event that Greece leaves the euro. The treaty establishing the European Monetary Union (EMU) forbids restrictions on capital or payment flows between EU member states, but an exiting country facing massive disruptions in its international capital account transactions would need to impose strict capital and foreign exchange controls if some semblance of financial order is to be maintained.
Greece is in a difficult situation because already about 25% of domestic business is done on grey and black markets. So the effective exchange rate for drachmas would be significantly different from the one the offered by the Greek Central Bank.
While currency devaluation provides long-term opportunities for Greece to increase competitiveness in global markets, it can also produce a short-term nightmare. Rapid inflation of prices would destabilize Greeks’ way of life, as prices soar on even the most basic goods and lifetime savings evaporate overnight. The key to stalling the drachma’s free-fall is a carefully managed money supply, but the allure of printing more cash could lead to hyperinflation.
Greece has already been racked by violent protests in the wake of austerity measures, and an even sharper economic downturn could turn severe dismay into protests on the street. Quite likely governments will rise and fall quickly. Grexit could enable a military coup to
occur in an attempt to establish a stable government.
Now let’s see what happens to the euro. Because the EMU was intended to be permanent, there’s no established process for leaving the eurozone. The eurozone national central banks would try to stay out of the economic crisis. Therefore, the European Central Bank (ECB) would be stuck as the institution responsible for maintaining the price stability and creditworthiness of the euro. The ECB would see big capital losses. While it would be difficult to actually render the ECB insolvent, such losses would nonetheless alarm investors worried about its credibility.
An increasingly bearish private sector is already beginning to price the losses it would take during a Grexit, with more and more analysts, investors, and even politicians beginning to believe this is inevitable. Even so, a Grexit would probably be a prelude to another debt restructuring, as the country still won’t be able to borrow to pay off its debts. This is obviously a negative for debt-holders.
At the same time, other countries–in particular Portugal, Spain and Italy–are likely to have difficulty in finding purchasers for their debt. Spain has an annual GDP of over $1 trillion. Italy is a member of the G8!
It’s quite possible that Grexit would cause the rest of the eurozone to do something the French and Italians have been fighting against, a closer financial integration in order to maintain stability of the euro. I suspect the ECB would become a true lender of last resort, something it is presently forbidden to be.
I think while the short term results of a Grexit would be quite spectacular, the long term effects would end with a strengthened euro. Remember Germany is still one of the strongest economic powers in the world. I believe the Germans would not allow the euro to fail.
Okay, lecture over. You can all wake up now.
‘Tis, you are hardly sleep-inducing.
Romney is at war with Eurasia. He has ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia.
Thanks Tis.
I can see how Greece leaving the Euro would be a disaster for them. It would be their Great Depression and the UN would probably end up sending in relief supplies.
So the EMU is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Euro doesn’t quite work and they can’t get out of it.
That is the other failing of the Euro. It’s a strait jacket for the individual countries like Greece or Spain. When they run into trouble, they don’t have the usual financial tools to deal with it. It’s austerity or nothing.
At least the USA can run huge deficits and print money during a recession. It’s not desirable but if we didn’t, the Great Recession would have been the Great Depression.
So points against the survival of the Euro.
1. Individual European countries are too different economicly to have a uniform currency.
2. It is too fragile.
3. It is a stait jacket for countries, not allowing them to deal with their own economic problems.
4. They have no way to fix the Euro. There have been solutions every few months that never actually fix anything for long.
Points for survival.
1. They are stuck. There is no easy way out without touching off a major recession at the least.
One has to ask, knowing what they know now, would the Europeans have invented the Euro?
I suspect that the Euro won’t collapse soon, no matter what. They will just stumble along, trying this and that for years. And who knows, maybe they will fix it in the end.
I’ll add here for anyone unlikely enough to be following this.
One of the eerie things about looking at what Bush managed to do to the USA without even trying, a lost generation and a Great Recession. Or the Europeans did with the Euro with the very best of intentions.
Our modern economic systems and our whole civilization is fragile. It really doesn’t take much to do a whole lot of damage to them.
It would be better if they were more sturdy and robust but, if anyone knows how to do that, I haven’t heard of it.
This is something politicians playing games with the economy don’t realize.
Globalization actually started in the 1880s and was going strong for the next 30 years. It collapsed during World War I with the two strongest financial centers (London and Berlin) on opposite sides of the war. The rest of the 20th Century was spent reestablishing the international economic situation of July 1914. Naturally there have been major changes, for example the two strongest financial centers are now New York and Beijing, but the world economy is now similar to that found pre-WWI.
Think about that for a minute. It’s taken almost 90 years for the world’s economy to recover from World War I. Most people don’t realize what that war cost in economic terms. World War I was one of the proximate causes of the Great Depression. That there wasn’t another global depression after World War II was due to some very shrewd moves by a bunch of governments working together (the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference was critical) and a bunch of luck.
There are some people actively sabotaging the world’s economy for short term gains. There are events which could easily take place which would bring down that economy, like a Middle Eastern war. There are some incredibly short-sighted people who either don’t know or don’t care about the results of their actions on the rest of the world. One of these people is running for President of the US.
‘Tis Himself writes:
Actually, plagiarized from Simone Foxman’s article at Business Insider, GET READY: This Is What Happens If Greece Exits The Euro.
This is part of a pattern of behavior.