Private Equity

When the head of JPMorgan Chase met with shareholders to answer for a trading loss of more than $2 billion Tuesday, it was against an evolving political backdrop: Donors from big banks are betting on Mitt Romney to defeat President Obama and repeal new restraints on risky, large-scale investments. "There's no doubt that there's been a big diminution of support for the president," said William M. Daley, Obama's former chief of staff and a former top JPMorgan Chase executive. "People in the financial services sector are saying, ‘The president has been too tough on us, both in policy and on...

It was inevitable that Mitt Romney's career at Bain Capital would feature prominently in the presidential race, because both candidates need to exploit it in order to win. Romney, who has opted to de-emphasize his term as Massachusetts governor, needs to convince voters that his tenure at the private equity firm imbued him with special skills to fix the weak economy. Obama, who has presided over that economy, must convince them of just the opposite — that Romney's business skills don't apply to the presidency and they'd be better off sticking with him. Obama's reelection, in other words, hinges on...

A top surrogate to Mitt Romney said making money -- rather than creating jobs -- was the primary goal of the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee when he was running Bain Capital LLC , saying he "acted responsibly" as chief executive officer of the Boston-based private-equity firm. "The role of private equity as fiduciaries is certainly to make money," said Tom Stemberg, the founder of Staples Inc. , in an interview on Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital.

Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday laced into the Republican Party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, saying its Tea Party movement faction has blocked progress by President Obama while Romney wants to take the country back to recessionary practices. "They begin to sound like the horse that just won the Derby and the Preakness, ‘I'll Have Another,' " Biden told an audience at Keene State College. "Except the horse is a real winner. " Broadening his attack, the vice president said, "We will not go back to the '50s on social policy, to the Cold War on our...

In the final months of two mostly unmemorable terms in office, Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri boasted about his little state's big splash - stealing former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling and his nascent video game company from Massachusetts. "This is a risk worth taking," said Carcieri, a Republican, announcing the 2010 deal that lured Schilling's company, 38 Studios, to Providence, and put Rhode Island taxpayers on the hook for up to $75 million in guaranteed loans to an athlete who liked video games but had never developed one. "I think the governor...

"No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years" - Article II, Section 1 THE CONSTITUTION may be the foundation of American democracy, but the qualifications to run for president are — let's face it — so...

Federal and state authorities are pulling back the covers on the secretive world of private equity by examining how these firms value the investments in the portfolios they run for pension funds, endowments, and nonprofits. The Securities and Exchange Commission has sent letters of inquiry to about a dozen firms, asking how they value the investments in their private equity funds, according to two people briefed on the matter. Both the SEC and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley are looking more closely at a particular fund, the Oppenheimer Global Resource Private...

NEW YORK — Del Monte Foods Co. yesterday agreed to be bought for $4 billion in cash by a group of investors that includes its former owner in what would be the biggest private equity deal of the year. An investor group led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. — which briefly owned Del Monte — Vestar Capital Partners, and Centerview Partners agreed to buy the food maker for $19 per share. They will also assume $1.3 billion in debt. The purchase price is a 6 percent premium to the stock’s closing price on Wednesday, though the stock is up 59 percent since the...

Four months after saying it might put itself up for sale, BJ’s Wholesale Club Inc. may have a buyer. Two private equity firms have joined to make an offer to purchase BJ’s for an undisclosed sum. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing yesterday, Leonard Green & Partners LP and CVC Capital Partners said that they want to buy the wholesale retail chain. In February, BJ’s said it was considering selling the company — after an earlier announcement that it would close five stores and cut about 500 jobs — and hired Morgan Stanley to offer advice on a...

Amid a flash of cameras, Mitt Romney signed the check to buy Domino's Pizza with a flourish. It was a huge deal for Romney's Bain Capital back in 1998, worth $1.1 billion. Thomas Monaghan, the pizza magnate and orphan raised by nuns in the Detroit area, was cashing out all but a small stake. He wanted the proceeds to start a Catholic university. So he handed over control of the company he built from a small pizza shop in Ypsilanti, Mich., in 1960, to Romney and the partners of Bain Capital.

Mitt Romney gave President Obama a taste of his own medicine Wednesday with a new Web video featuring struggling Americans who pin their financial straits on unfulfilled economic promises by the president. In recent ads , it has been the Obama campaign spotlighting people who have lost jobs, benefits and pensions, but they have blamed Romney and Bain Capital, the private equity firm he led from 1984 to 1999. The Obama ads have been criticized, even by some Democrats, as unfair attacks on free enterprise.

President Obama has accepted $92,270 in his last two campaigns from employees of Bain Capital, the private equity firm formerly led by Mitt Romney, which he has villainized for profiting on failed companies that laid off workers. Romney has taken $229,650, more than any other politician. But together, Democratic candidates and committees have received more than $1.3 million from Bain Capital workers since the 2008 election cycle - double the amount collected by Republicans. The willingness of Obama and his party to fund their campaigns with Bain Capital money...

President Obama has accepted $92,270 in his last two campaigns from employees of Bain Capital, the private equity firm formerly led by Mitt Romney, which he has villainized for profiting on failed companies that laid off workers. Romney has taken $229,650, more than any other politician. But together, Democratic candidates and committees have received more than $1.3 million from Bain Capital workers since the 2008 election cycle - double the amount collected by Republicans. The willingness of Obama and his party to fund their campaigns with Bain Capital money threatens to...

President Obama Monday vigorously defended his reelection campaign's attacks on Mitt Romney's business record, saying the principles of private equity do not apply to the presidency. "If your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,' then you're missing what this job is about," Obama said. "My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. " In a challenge to the Romney campaign, Obama pointedly said this issue would be a focal point of his effort to win reelection.

All day Monday, Republicans played offense and Democrats were on defense after Newark Mayor Cory Booker committed a political faux pas over the weekend. The Obama surrogate said his candidate's attack on Mitt Romney's Bain Capital record was as "nauseating" as reports of planned Republican attacks on President Obama's former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The public rebuke by a supposed presidential supporter undercut the message of an ad the Obama campaign ran last week about Bain's handling of a steel plant in Missouri.

Vice President Joe Biden today laced into the Republican Party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, saying its Tea Party faction had blocked progress by President Obama while Romney wants to take the country back to recessionary practices. "They begin to sound like the horse that just won the Derby and the Preakness, ‘I'll Have Another,'" Biden told an audience at Keene State College. "Except the horse is a real winner. " Broadening his attack, the vice president said: "We will not go back to the ‘50s on social policy, to the Cold War on...

Bain Capital executives have been bracing since last summer for the inevitable downside to their old boss running for president: seeing their firm's name dragged through the mud by Mitt Romney's opponents. But the onslaught has come harder and faster than they or the industry expected, with Romney's emergence as a frontrunner in the primaries. Republican rivals have painted Bain Capital and private equity firms like it as engaged in the wrong kind of capitalism, making money as corporate raiders and by cutting jobs.

NEW YORK - In recent years, the private equity industry has escaped much of the regulatory scrutiny that has been directed toward hedge funds and Wall Street banks. But that appears to be changing. The Securities and Exchange Commission has begun a broad examination of the private equity industry, seeking information about the business practices of some of the country's most powerful financial firms. The SEC's enforcement unit sent a letter late last year to several private equity funds as part of what it called an "informal inquiry" into the industry, according to...

The core of his presidential candidacy under attack, Mitt Romney has yet to shape a playbook to defend a quarter-century in the business world that created great riches for him and great hardship, at times, for some American workers. Romney and his aides have struggled to respond consistently to intensifying criticism about his tenure at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he helped found, and how it would be reflected in his presidency. The lack of a cohesive message stems, in part, from Romney's fundamental belief that any debate that puts the economy front and center is a win...