Mitt Romney's Amazing IRA Investments

Published on: 2012-07-08 23:59:30

If a couple is only allowed to place $10,000/year into an IRA, how is it that Mitt and Ann Romney's IRA is valued at $102,000,000? We need to see ALL the tax returns!

According to Vanity Fair, it was quite the "scheme":

The Romneys won’t say, but Mark Maremont, writing inThe Wall Street Journal, uncovered a likely explanation. When Bain Capital bought companies, it would create two classes of shares, named A and L. The A shares were risky common shares, to which they would assign a very low value. The L shares were preferred shares, paying a high dividend but with the payoff frozen, and most of the value was assigned to them. Bain employees would then put the exciting A shares in their I.R.A. accounts, where they grew tax-free. With all the risk of the deal, the A shares stood to gain a lot or collapse. But if the deal succeeded, the springing value could be stunning: Bain employees saw their A shares from one particularly fruitful deal grow 583-fold, 16 times faster than the underlying stock.

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