Bubble Finance, 1987-2014

So when all was said and done, Willard “Mitt” Romney was a creature of the great deformation of finance that had been unleashed by the administration in which his father had served as secretary of HUD. History has left few clues about what George Romney thought about Nixon’s final destruction of the gold dollar, but his son’s business history documents in spades how Nixon’s actions eventually destroyed the free market in finance and fostered an unsustainable era of debt-fueled GDP growth and speculation- driven accumulation of wealth by the 1 percent.

That Mitt Romney turned out to be the conservative party’s candidate for president in 2012 is ironic in the extreme. As detailed below, Romney’s winnings from bubble finance during his years at Bain Capital were so preposterously impossible in an honest free market that it is no wonder that his 2012 campaign amounted to one giant platitude. He honestly thought his experience doing leveraged buyouts could show the way forward to ameliorate the nation’s economic ills. In fact, Romney had been an energetic agent of the very financialization process that had generated the economic failures against which he campaigned.-The Truman Show of Bubble Finance, 1987-2014, RIP