Matt Taibbi has a timely explanation of how Mitt Romney made his fortune. It’s kind of long and the first fifth of it is pretty much contentless diatribe, but it does finally get to the point. If you come to really understand how a leveraged buyout works and why they can be so ridiculously lucrative, you probably will be more interested in forcibly separating Romney from his money than you will be in voting for him.
The leveraged buyout is really not an essential component of free-market capitalism. And a few tweaks in our tax laws would make them both less common and less destructive. It’s hard to define what Romney did as anything other than looting.
