Mitt Romney, the Schrodinger’s Cat of private equity

[SunsetDreams]

Mitt Romney is a quantum CEO, the Schrodinger’s Cat of private equity: From 1999 to 2002, he both was and was not the chief executive officer and sole owner of a powerful Bain Capital investment fund. After that period, Romney’s surrogates explain, he “retroactively” retired from this post. But, as Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment reminds us, just because you find a retroactively dead cat doesn’t mean he wasn’t previously simultaneously alive and dead.

While the two presidential campaigns tussle over this paradox, the real shame is how willing Romney and his defenders are to tolerate this bending of the truth, heretofore confined to particle physics. It’s another insight into the increasingly murky culture of American capitalism.

While Romney has claimed at times he was retired from Bain Capital during the period, he also signed documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission attesting that he was the “sole stockholder, sole director, Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director and President” of a multimillion-dollar investment fund.

Romney signed the filings because of a law passed by Congress in 1968 that tried to make financial markets more transparent. At the time, early corporate raiders – the progenitors of Romney and his colleagues at Bain – had been buying up stock in secret to seize control of public companies. They hoped to replace management and improve them enough to turn a profit. Like the similar efforts of Romney and other buyout specialists, some of the companies were run straight into bankruptcy, though rarely at a loss for the raiders.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/07/19/mitt-romney-the-schrodingers-cat-of-private-equity/

[coalition_unwilling]

1. Awesome cartoon. Might be interesting to take Heisenberg's

Uncertainty Principle and apply it to Mitt's campaign. To wit, you never know where Mitt stands any issue at any given time and any attempt to fix his position requires more energy than that with which he holds his position. So one can only state a probability that Mitt holds any given position on any given issue at any given time.

From an enthusiastic, but layman, physicist

[Democrats_win]

2. Mitt, the electron that took all possible paths to the election.

With apologies to Feynman who came up with the idea that electrons take all possible paths. This is such an amazing thing to me because a former Bain employee was on Up with Chris Hayes Sunday and gave a panglossian view of the free market that we "live in the best of all possible worlds." (from Voltaire's Candide) So which is it? Do we live in "all possible worlds" or the "best of all possible worlds.

Well one thing is for sure, if we elect Mitt, we won't be living in the best of times, but maybe we could retroactively go back to a time when Mitt hadn't been elected. Thankfully, we haven't yet violated causality.

[SunsetDreams]

5. I would have liked to

retroactively go back to a time when Bush 2.0 on steroids wasn't installed.

[wandy]

3. I Like It!

[SunsetDreams]

4. me too :)

[BumRushDaShow]

6. And to think I had to take

a semester course in elementary particle physics 30 years ago and this guy fits the everywhere-at-once model because he has so carefully kept his whereabouts obfuscated, you can't pinpoint him long enough to confirm his location.

[napkinz]

7. Schrodinger’s candidate ...

[Digit]

8. heh heh good one!

excellent!