“Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer and Matt Taibbi, contributing editor for Rolling Stone, discuss Taibbi’s cover story for the magazine, a take-down of Mitt Romney’s business career titled “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.”
Taibbi explains how Romney acquired companies at Bain Capital — by borrowing most of the money and then saddling the companies with the debt: “[Romney has] talked about how America’s national debt is like one of those nightmare, no-money-down mortgages, but, in fact, what he did at Bain Capital is exactly that same mechanism except on a much huger scale.”
Spitzer notes Romney never actually managed the companies he bought, but was just “a financial engineer.” Taibbi agrees. “A lot of people think that Mitt Romney was really in the business of turning companies around — that’s not really what he was doing. He was in the business of extracting value for his investors, which is a completely different thing,” Taibbi says.
