![]() ![]() So how did Romney do it? According to the private-equity executives I talked to, the secret is likely in the compensation arrangement the industry has cut with its well-heeled investors. ![]() (The lower range Romney put for disclosure purposes on his IRA was $20 million.) If he was a talented investor and his IRA grew tenfold - something not many people can achieve - his IRA would be have been worth $4.5 million, a far cry indeed from the upper range of $102 million he says it is worth. If we stipulate that when he was at Bain from 1984 to 1999, Romney put the maximum $30,000 a year into his so-called SEP-IRA, then as a baseline his IRA should have had a value of $450,000 by the time he left to run the Salt Lake City Olympic Games. The truth about Romney's IRA is that its massive size has very little to do with choosing the right investments and a lot more to do with the alchemy of the private-equity business itself and the opportunities that come out of that insular world for people like Romney, who was the founder and chief executive of Bain Capital for at least 15 years. This is not something your average American can do, and not only because the average American in not likely to have Romney's investing prowess or his ability to hire people with exceptional investing skills. I have also wondered how Romney did it, and after Rattner remarks, determined once and for all to get to the bottom of this mystery: How can an individual retirement account that was limited by law to annual contributions of at most $30,000 grow into a fund with more than $100 million in it? So he's pushed the envelope all the way to the edge to his benefit and I think Americans would find that very distasteful." I do not know anyone who did everything that he did and some of what he did - like the IRA - I've asked fellow private-equity guys, none of us had even known this was a possible 'trick' if you will. I want to push this to the edge,' I will tell you that, as a private-equity guy, I'm familiar with many of the things that he did and I know many people who've done many of the things that he did. "If you say to your tax people," Rattner told Fareed Zakaria about Romney in a late JUly edition of GPS, "as he seems to have done: 'I want every trick in the book. Rattner has pegged his own net worth - released as part of his vetting by the Obama Administration - at between $188 million and $608 million, on a par with Romney's.īut the Romney IRA has him stumped. You know something is pretty unusual about Mitt Romney's extraordinary $102 million IRA when Steven Rattner, his fellow former private-equity mogul, can go on national television and marvel at just how Romney was able to do it.Īdmittedly, Rattner is a somewhat partisan skeptic - he was Obama's car czar and has been busy reinventing himself as a limousine-liberal pundit since his own bribery scandal forced him out of government - but as the founder of the soon-to-be-defunct Quadrangle Group in New York (in which I am a small investor), he also has been anything but shy in the past about availing himself of whatever financial perks are available to the tiny cohort of finance executives lucky enough to work in private equity. Romney poses with fellow Bain Capital executives. ![]()
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