[jeffkrol]

David Stockman On Mitt Romney: 'He Was A Master Financial Speculator'

“Mitt Romney was not a businessman,” he wrote. “He was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses.”
Stockman goes on to write: “Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.”

or if you prefer the original...............

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/14/david-stockman-mitt-romney-...ain-drain.html

Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims

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That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where 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.

all you "free market Capitalists" are screwed either way apparently...............

[boriscleto]

His campaign slogan isn't just dead wrong, it's plagerized.

Peter Berg Mitt Romney plagiarism: Can you plagiarize Friday Night Lights’ catchphrase “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”? - Slate Magazine

[Nesster]

Sour grapes, man, sour grapes. We will get 4 to 8 years of Mitt, and possibly an additional 4 of Ryan.

[GeneV]

Stockman has hit the nail on the head. Gov. Romney's business experience is exactly what is wrong with American capitalism. The tail of the markets and financial sectors are wagging the dog. Herman Cain actually had a more relevant experience. He made and sold something.

Romney's narrative acts as though Flip this House were This Old House. We need a little less flipping and a little more rebuilding.

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Last edited by GeneV; 10-16-2012 at 06:03 AM.

[Nesster]

Herman Cain actually had a more relevant experience. He made and sold something.

"something" is right, did you ever taste the 'pizza'?