Romney’s Bain 1
Jacob Weisberg takes an intense look at the leveraged buy-out industry (AKA vulture capitalism), which makes money by gutting companies, and how it differs from industrial capitalism, which makes money by building companies.
A nugget:
This difference encapsulates the change from corporate titans who lived in the same world as the people who worked for them, in an America with real social mobility, to a financial overclass that makes its own rules and has choked off social mobility. The elder Romney wasn’t embarrassed to explain what he’d done as a businessman or to release his tax returns.
August 16, 2012 at 3:37 pm
This is an especially interesting point because Romney the Younger’s style of corporate capitalism, if applied when his dad was boss, would have called for American Motors to be looted and then destroyed. I remember it as the ugly duckling of American car manufacturers, famous for a regular series of laughable and almost laughable designs, the Pacer and the Gremlin. I have a hard time seeing Mitt Romney being for anything but liquidate for a company that made the Nash Rambler. I do remember a friend dearly loving his Javelin and my ex-wife had what a Hornet, which she called the ‘s— mobile.’