[In the 1980’s and early 1990’s I did quite a bit of crisis consulting for banks. One of my clients was one of oldest savings banks in the country and it took 10 years of grossly incompetent management to push it to the brink of catastrophe. Our team was able to rehabilitate the bank and we remarked at the time that, “it is really hard to destroy a good brand”. Of course that was before the advent of woke management and woke media.]
Private equity firms come in all stripes, with a wide variety of ethical commitments. Some firms provide a way for small public companies to “go private” in order to manage themselves more strategically, free of the quarterly earnings obsession of public markets. Some provide financing for growing companies on the way to going public. Sadly, some could be fairly characterized as vulture funds, which buy mature companies, sell off assets, pay themselves huge dividends, load up on debt and pay themselves more huge dividends. This process sucks the company dry with bankruptcy or going public to bail out the PE sponsor
Romney’s firm Bain Capital indulged in quite a few of the latter type of transactions. I’m sure there are Romney fans here, but his vaunted private sector skill is mostly a sham. Rather, he is one of the biggest practitioners of predatory crony capitalism of our day.