Too Stupid to Organize Conference Calls
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Romney made a fortune saddling companies with debt, extracting millions of dollars in fees telling them who to fire, to try to finance and pay off the debt he helped create. Romney could have played Gordon Gekko.
Most of Romney's money was never made in venture capital, although he did have a large hand in getting Staples off the ground.
Trump certainly has his failures and bankrupt companies.
But the difference I see, is that Trump had failures while trying to build something and Mitt made most of his money by tearing things apart.
And then Romney has his Profiles in Courage moment, in a combination of pique and national political aspiration, disregarding what his constituents told him and hurting his party.
If you want to die on Romney Hill, jon, I'll be happy to lob the Truth grenades your way.
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Private equity is Schumpeterian creative destruction in its purest form. Like all economic dynamism, it has short term losers and winners but the economy is better for it in the long term. AOC, Sanders, and Larry can zoom in on the losers and declare it a failure, but calmer heads will zoom out and look at the big picture.
Of course not all private equity turn-arounds succeed. But there's a market test for the firms that do it, they need to be able to finance it. It's an iterative game.
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@jon-nyc said in Too Stupid to Organize Conference Calls:
Always the last refuge. But it’s a telling one. It means ‘I have no substantive reply to your current argument’.
You might think it’s a mic drop but it’s really a retreat.
On what planet would you have voted for Mitt since you referenced him with such great reverence?
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Oh, I've said this repeatedly. I really really really wish he had won in 2012. With hindsight, obviously (I voted for Obama). Nothing good came out of Obama's second term, and a Romney presidency would have saved us from Trump.
But that's really beside the point here.
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I remember when Mitt Romney was awesome and was going to put America back on track, and anybody who said he was a vulture capitalist was a brain dead libtard.
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You mean the way you zoom in on Trump in order to bash him instead of zooming out to look at the bigger picture?
I never said all turnarounds were a bad thing. My point was that you cherry picked and exaggerated negatives in order to bash Trump while cherry picking and downplaying negatives in order to build up Romney - something you only did so you could bash Trump some more.
You were being dishonest, and I called you on it.
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Anecdote: I’ve worked on several PE deals. A handful even went through to completion.
All of those companies have grown like gangbusters and hired to accommodate.
PE is not a bogeyman. It’s an alternate vehicle to the public markets and LPs include regulars retirement funds and investors.
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@jon-nyc said in Too Stupid to Organize Conference Calls:
Oh, I've said this repeatedly. I really really really wish he had won in 2012. With hindsight, obviously (I voted for Obama). Nothing good came out of Obama's second term, and a Romney presidency would have saved us from Trump.
But that's really beside the point here.
Well the initial point was incompetence on a conference call which is an interesting premise for an argument if we want to go there.
On point two, yeah, Trump is not a great businessman by many definitions but then again this is only one of hundreds of different attacks on him, so re-arguing one point versus the more blatantly false attacks on him that many choose to ignore is not intellectually honest.
So my retreat I guess is a debate point loss if that is the narrow game we are playing.
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It would be funny if it weren't so sad... Trump is being bashed for taking advantage of the bankruptcy laws as a business move, something that is perfectly legal and recognized as a smart business strategy, while Romney is being hailed as some sort of business genius for using other peoples' money to line his own pockets by picking the bones of someone else's misfortune and throwing thousands of people out of work... Trump is a failure in business while Romney is successful the argument goes, even though over roughly the same period of time Romney amassed a net worth of around 200 million, while the failure Trump only managed to scrape together a few billion...
And as proof of this "logic", we get Ax quoting an article from the New York Times .....
Bahahahaaaaa
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@jon-nyc said in Too Stupid to Organize Conference Calls:
The guy who turned around more businesses than the rest of the Senate combined was rejected by the serial bankrupter of businesses. Makes sense.
MFR has been through a Bain 'turnaround'. It ain't pretty and is done on the backs of the workers for the most part.
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I've always thought Romney was an asshole. His disagreement with Trump isn't one of principle, it's more him deciding to position himself for the future.
He did do a pretty good job as governor of MA, but he's still an unprincipled political flip-flopper.
What we think of Trump shouldn't have any bearing on what we think of Romney.
