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News & ArtsMonday, June 25, 2012
2012 / Money Mitt Romney, Afloat on Junk Bonds
Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 10:25 AM
Yesterday, the Boston Globe published a great investigative report titled "Mitt and the junk bond king." While it's not likely to set the political blogosphere on fire, it's still an illuminating portrait of Mitt Romney at the height of his financial powers. Turns out, he's been a vacillator his whole life.
The “glorious” part, for Romney at least, was that he used junk-bond financing to turn a $10 million investment into a $175 million profit for himself, his partners, and his investors. It marked a turning point for Romney, according to Marc Wolpow, a former Drexel employee who was involved in the deal and later was hired by Romney to work at Bain Capital.
“Mitt, I think, spent his life balanced between fear and greed,” Wolpow said. “He knew that he had to make a lot of money to launch his political career. It’s very hard to make a lot of money without taking some kind of reputational risk along the way. It’s just hard to do. It doesn’t mean you have to do anything illegal or immoral, but you often have to take reputational risk to make money.”
It's a little dense for Monday morning reading, but you should save the story for later. You can get a real sense of Romney—smart, shrewd, greedy, ambitious, overcautious, eager-to-please, unconcerned with the little people—at an early point in his career.
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