How has Romney run his successful businesses in the past?

First he looks around for a company that isn’t producing as well as it should with the assets it has.

He then acquires the company at a reduced rate, since the company isn’t producing as well as it could. He goes to cronies to borrow the money needed to make the purchase, using the assets of the company being acquired to guarantee the loans. The cronies may slice and dice the secured loans and resell them to other investors.

Then he brings in his crack Management Team to revamp the operations to use those precious assets to the best of their potential. Quite often the company employees are not considered part of the assets and will be made redundant while the work they do is outsourced to low-cost contractors. Said contractors may be off-shore so the jobs are no longer in the US.

Facilities, now empty,  may provide some excellent real estate opportunities. Sub-divisions can be sold off, reducing overhead.  Pension funds are other assets that can be better used elsewhere.  All the while, the Management Team is racking up their consulting fees.

And in the end, Romney may have made the company a leaner producer and can sell it to the public, keeping the original loans on the companies books to be repaid over time. What he gets for selling it is the additional profit, over the management fees, that goes to his pockets. If he can’t sell it because the company is too lean and can’t exist with the remaining assets then he and his team can bail out without a loss (all the loans are on the company’s books) and leave the company to resolve its debts through bankruptcy and leaving the secondary loan investors to collect their loan repayments from the courts, if they can.

Then he turns his attention to the United States.  We certainly have a lot of idle or under-performing assets: National Parks, National Forests, Public Lands, Military Reservations, an Air Force, a Navy, an Army, a Coast Guard, lots of Government Buildings, a large Pension Fund. He has something to work with.