Let’s not forget that Mitt made his fortune picking winners and loser. And he picked plenty of losers.
by digby
Kevin Drum looks into Romney’s green jobs claim last night and find that he was lying. (I know, hard to believe …)
Here is Mitt Romney last night, criticizing the green energy loan guarantee program that was part of the stimulus bill:
You put $90 billion into green jobs….And these businesses, many of them have gone out of business, I think about half of them, of the ones have been invested in have gone out of business.
Close! The DOE 1705 program has approved 33 loans worth about $16 billion. So far there have been three failures (Solyndra, Beacon, and Abound), which works out to a failure rate of….
9%.
By dollar volume, these loans will cost a maximum of about $600 million if the government ends up on the hook for the entire loan amount. That comes to maybe 4% of the total. By other measures, the failure rate is less than 1%
Let’s talk about failure rates, shall we?
Much of the firm’s profits was earned from a relatively small number of deals, with Bain Capital’s overall success and failure rate being about even. One study of 68 deals that Bain Capital made up through the 1990s found that the firm lost money or broke even on 33 of them. Another study that looked at the eight-year period following 77 deals during the same time found that in 17 cases the company went bankrupt or out of business, and in 6 cases Bain Capital lost all its investment. But 10 deals were very successful and represented 70 percent of the total profits.
It takes a lot of chutzpah for Mr Bain to attack the government for investing in some companies that lost money. Romney made his fortune picking winners and losers. That’s his business model. He’s lying about the green jobs initiative (of course) but he’s also acting as if he’s never had a losing proposition in his life. In fact, he’s the one who broke even on the picks, not the government.
.