How much he's got:
"Romney worth as much as $250m, his campaign says
WASHINGTON - The Romneys have vast financial
holdings and use a range of investment tools, which were displayed
throughout a 20-page filing that was stamped by the FEC at 4:24 p.m. on
Friday - typically a time when inconvenient news is released.
We call it Slow Saturday here at the MSM Monitor.
Romney’s
wealth has been a sensitive issue during his campaign....
Because he's hidden all the loot he got driving companies into debt in overseas accounts and things of that nature.
Romney’s stocks were sold in a
wide range of companies, including Apple, Boeing, Google, and
McDonalds.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: Bad Apple Avoids Taxes
Must have learned it from Mitt.
McDonald’s warns global economy woes squeezing second-quarter results
I hope Mitt's portfolio doesn't take too much of a hit.
He also sold stock in Walmart de Mexico, which is under
investigation for bribing officials in Mexico, and in British Sky
Broadcasting, the company that Rupert Murdoch had sought to buy before
his company was ensnared in a British phone-hacking scandal.
More related: Sunday Globe Special: Walmart's Mexican Cover-Up
Murdoch is Mad
Mitt is seeming more that way every day.
--more--"
How he "made" it:
"How 1 mill thrived, 1 failed after Bain invested; Profits for Mitt Romney, firm in both deals" by Brian MacQuarrie and Bobby Caina Calvan |
Globe Staff, June 05, 2012
FORT WAYNE, Ind. - As depicted in a campaign ad for
President Obama, Mitt Romney and Bain Capital’s single-minded pursuit of
riches led to bankruptcy and hundreds of layoffs at a Kansas City steel
mill. In a dueling ad for Romney, Bain’s seed money for a start-up
steel mill in Indiana created thousands of good-paying jobs.
One industry, two deals, opposite outcomes.
At GS Industries in Kansas City, Mo., the 750 workers lost their jobs
and much of their health and pension benefits. At Steel Dynamics in
Butler, Ind. - 600 miles to the east - the mill’s brisk business
produced jobs that paid steel workers an average of $80,000 a year.
The
common denominator is that Romney and his Bain Capital partners
profited from both investments at both plants. Now each is being used to
bolster political claims in a heated presidential race that will hinge
on Romney’s track record as a businessman and Americans’ fears about job
losses.
An on-the-ground look at the fortunes of these two Midwestern steel
factories illuminates how Bain - which Romney built into one of the
leading private equity companies in the United States - augmented its
own investments with large amounts of debt and community taxpayer
support to make forays into a rapidly changing segment of heavy
industry.
In one case, Bain tried to prop up a traditional steel maker that was
struggling. In the other, it bet on innovative technology and was able
to declare a bigger and more lucrative victory.
“These guys are risk-based investors. You do it for a reward,’’ said
Keith Busse, chairman of Steel Dynamics, the successful Indiana plant.
“Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.’’
Just ask Schilling.
Bain invested $18 million in Steel Dynamics in 1994. In 1999,
according to a Deutsche Bank report, the firm sold its minority stake
for $104 million in a company that now employs 6,500 people and is the
fifth-largest steelmaker in the United States.
“A lot of things would probably be different if they weren’t
around,’’ said Dan Keller, 52, one of the company’s earliest employees.
“High-paying jobs wouldn’t be here.’’
In Kansas City, Bain’s experience as the largest stakeholder in GS Industries was dismally different.
“We made the best steel in the country,’’ said Vernon Corliss, 69,
who worked at GS Industries in Kansas City, and suffers from
lung-damaging asbestosis. “And they took everything away from us - our
jobs, our pensions, our health insurance - and that’s not right.’’
Bain invested $8 million in 1993 in what had been a plodding,
old-line mill that was hemorrhaging jobs and losing business to cheaper
imports. It later reinvested $16 million in the plant that it received
from the sale of some GS Industries foreign assets. It extracted $36
million in dividends before the plant went bankrupt in 2001, according
to Reuters. That would suggest a profit of over $12 million, but Bain
officials say the firm made $8 million on GS Industries.
Does it really matter how much they profited when the place went bankrupt?
Bain and its partners bet that modernizing the plant, coupled with
the prospect of continued profits from the steel balls it made for
grinding, would justify the investment. The company also manufactured
steel rods and such mundane items as wire hangers, barbed wire, and
chain-link fencing.
“We liked the management team,’’ said Paul Edgerley, a Bain managing
director who analyzed GS Industries before the investment. “We felt like
it was a good chance to take an antiquated facility and update it.’’
Lost(?) their bet?
That calculus was badly shaken by the Asian financial crisis in 1997,
which opened the floodgates for cheap imports to the United States and
accelerated GS Industries’ slide into bankruptcy in 2001.
In addition to the loss of jobs for 750 union workers, the federal
government stepped in to cover $44 million in underfunded pensions.
Meaning taxpayers stepped in.
Jeff Jones, who worked at GS Industries for its final seven years,
said Bain’s and Romney’s decision set up the mill for failure.
Although Romney left Bain in 1999 to be lead organizer for the 2002
Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he continued to profit from the
firm’s investments.
“I never thought of Bain Capital as a job creator. I thought of them
as a wealth maker,’’ said US Representative Emanuel Cleaver, who was
mayor of Kansas City when Bain bought the steel mill and now serves as
cochairman for the Obama campaign. “I watched it with my own eyes go
downhill.’’
A sense of betrayal still resonates among former employees at GS
Industries, whose sprawl of factories once employed more than 4,500
people near the confluence of the Missouri and Blue rivers.
“It was a good living,’’ said Jeff Jones, who worked at the steel
mill for its final seven years. He blames Bain Capital - and Romney, in
particular - for what he says was a decision to set up the mill for
failure.
“He says he never had anything to do with this, but in fact he had everything to do with closing down the plant,’’ Jones said.
Michelle Applebaum, a steel industry analyst based in Chicago, said that judgment is simplistic and flawed.
“They took a failing steel mill that would have been closed if they
hadn’t put the money in,’’ Applebaum said of Bain. “The company didn’t
fail because Bain was making money.’’
I can't imagine loading it with more debt while taking profits out of it helped.
Mark Essig, who served as chief executive of GS Industries from 1998
to 2002, oversaw the plant’s closure. “The combination of low prices and
high costs made the Kansas City plant a huge money loser,’’ Essig said.
“We tried to do everything we could to change the fortune of that
plant.’’
More than 600 miles to the east, at the Steel Dynamics mill in
Indiana, Bain is not the four-letter word it is in Kansas City. Here, at
the first mill built by a nonunion company that posted $8 billion in
net sales last year, the steelworkers average $80,000 in income that
includes performance-linked bonuses, corporate officials said.
Spread across 1,100 acres of former farmland, the Butler plant - a
so-called minimill - makes thin steel sheets through a revolutionary,
streamlined process that the lumbering behemoths that once epitomized
the American industry could not replicate.
For Bain, the potential of this low-cost technology - which uses
smaller, electric-arc chambers to turn scrap metal into molten steel -
was enormously attractive. The advantages were many: new methods, proven
management, and delivery times that were half of what the old
companies, encumbered by inefficient blast furnaces, could meet.
The mill received about $37 million in state and local tax incentives
to build in northeastern Indiana rather than Michigan or Ohio, where
the company also looked, including the benefits of a special income-tax
levy on county residents for infrastructure improvements. Company
officials said taxpayer support was important to create jobs, while
others saw “corporate welfare.’’
Unlike many of its competitors, Steel Dynamics’ cheaper costs helped
it prosper despite the imports that badly damaged the domestic industry.
“Even though it’s very risky to do start-ups, we felt like they had
good experience to build this kind of mill, with new and more efficient
technology that would make it competitive globally,’’ said Edgerley, who
also vetted the Steel Dynamics investment.
In both Kansas City and Butler, GE Capital, the investment and
financing arm of General Electric, approached Bain to suggest a
partnership.
Just a reminder: GE paid "no federal tax bill last year, even though it turned a $14.2 billion profit," In fact, GE got a $3.2 billion refund courtesy of the American taxpayer who is facing social service cuts.
Also see: Corporate Tax Dodge and Debt
I'm sure they are just "helping out" while lining their pockets like Bain here.
Edgerley and a team of Bain Capital employees investigated
the investment risks and decided that both businesses could be
successful, although GS Industries looked to be the more difficult
venture. To Edgerley, the echoes of the deals, as they are playing out
in TV spots, are often painful.
“We try to partner with management teams to make businesses more
successful and grow. Look, it hasn’t always worked, but it has in the
vast majority of cases,’’ Edgerley said. “It’s being politicized, and I
hate it.’’
--more--"
Related: Cerberus’s success hurt by a pair of gambles
Ah, the bane of Mitt Romney.
That's what happens when you make a deal with the devil.
Also see: Throwing the Booker at Obama Over Bain
That's why the issue has recently died down.
Who is giving it to him now:
"Romney pressing to align his backers; Texas win lets him hone the message" by
Matt Viser
Globe Staff
/
May 30, 2012
WASHINGTON
- A few hours before primary voters in Texas on Tuesday
night put him over the top in delegates, giving him the 1,144 needed for
his party’s nomination, he was on the Las Vegas Strip, holding court
with casino magnate and top Republican donor Sheldon Adelson inside his
opulent Venetian Hotel. Several blocks away, he appeared at a
fund-raiser with media mogul Donald Trump, whose comments often
overshadowed Romney....
On Tuesday, the Romney campaign released Romney’s birth certificate to
Reuters news service, confirming that he was born in Detroit on March
12, 1947. It also shows that his father, George, was born in Mexico, his
mother, Lenore, in Utah....
If his father was born in Mexico he could never have constitutionally become president, so WTF?
Related: The Reincarnation of George Romney
No, it's not in the form of his son.
The Trump discussion, which dominated the news coverage, distracted from....
Everything else.
--more--"
"Romney’s fund-raising outpaces president’s; Obama’s aides use news to press donors" by Callum Borchers |
Globe Correspondent, June 07, 2012
Mitt Romney’s joint fund-raising committee outraised President
Obama’s by nearly 30 percent in May, marking what appears to be the
first time since 2007 that Obama raised less than a rival.
Both Obama and Romney have formed joint committees that include their
parties’ national committees and select state committees. Romney’s
raked in $76.8 million last month, besting Obama’s $60 million. The
campaigns disclosed the totals on Twitter Thursday morning....
The amounts are mind-boggling to average people scraping to get by as all this money is tossed into politics.
--more--"
Next Day Update: In a world of super PACs, Mitt Romney rules
Of course, Obama is getting the smaller donations, which mathematically means more votes (same for Ron Paul, but we saw what happened to him).
Related: Utah is Mitt Romney’s key to Western contests
Also see: Two die in Utah as firefighting plane crashes
While we were out there.
