Obviously, I’m not a fan of Mitt Romney but I take these reports with a grain of salt. Critics can take legitimate business activities and distort them to look unethical. Something tells me that Mr. Colbert will be pretty selective in his moral outrage and not be so harsh on the business practices of George Soros.
Romney’s business at Bain is a problem.
He was in the levereged buyout business (in fact he helped originate it).
Do you remember how people started complaining in the 1980s that businesses had suddenly become too focused on the short term rather than the long term? That was a direct result of the emergence of the levereged buyout model.
The Bain model was essentially “house flipping” only with businesses. Find a business that is “a little run down”, get a no-money-down loan from a bank to purchase it, fix it up a little, resell it for more than you paid, pay off the loan, and keep the extra you made on the sale.
The problem is that businesses that focus on the long term can seem “a little run down” in the short term (at least on paper), and thus became targets for levereged buyouts. The only way for businesses to protect themselves from the levereged buyout frenzy was to abandon their long term focus and instead focus on the short term bottom line.
Romney’s work at Bain is a problem. It’s the same attitude as the IBGYBG (I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone) attitude that fueled the economy crash. A total focus on the short term, without any thought given to the damage that might be done in the long term.