Goldman Makes Money for the Romneys

After much pressure Mitt Romney released details from his previous tax returns.  What became interesting was Mr. Romney's ties with Goldman Sachs.  Many of the trusts held by the Romney's were managed by Goldman.


From Dealbook here are few points from their piece;

• Two Romney trusts – the Ann and Mitt Romney 1995 Family Trust and the W. Mitt Romney Blind Trust – made nearly $2.8 million in combined capital gains from their Goldman investments, according to the trusts’ filings. Almost all of those gains, nearly $2.7 million, were long-term gains made by selling securities that the trusts had owned for more than a year.
• The trusts sold a combined 7,000 shares of Goldman’s own stock, which was purchased in May 1999 when the firm went public. The shares, offered at the time of the I.P.O. to Goldman’s most important clients, including Mr. Romney, were issued at $53 a share. But they had zoomed up to $161.45 apiece by the time the trusts sold them in December 2010.
• Aside from the Goldman I.P.O. shares, the Romneys’ trusts sold several financial stocks in 2010. A January 2010 sale of Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase stock produced a small loss and a small gain, respectively. More common were sales of retail companies like Target, Unilever and Apple.
• Mr. Romney’s trusts made money on Research in Motion. His brokers bought shares in the BlackBerry maker in 2006 and 2008, long before the company’s stock began its precipitous slide. Before the worst hit last year, the trusts sold 1,027 shares in RIM, notching gains of more than $30,000.

Here are a few other bullet points from a WSJ Op Ed piece

• The details of Mr. Romney's six IRS schedules, eight forms and 69 income statements—totaling some 547 pages—are by now familiar. The Bain Capitalist made $21.7 million in 2010 and an estimated $20.9 million last year. He doesn't merely belong to the group President Obama disparages as "the rich." He's actually rich. Mr. Romney's effective tax rates are 21.2% in 2010 and 17.6% in 2011 as a share of adjusted gross income, and 13.9% and 15.4% as a share of taxable income, respectively. He still pays a lot of taxes—about $3 million in 2010 and an estimated $3.2 million in 2011.
• As the White House delights in pointing out, Mr. Romney nonetheless paid much less than the top marginal income-tax rate of 35% on wages because almost all of his income came from his investment portfolio, which is held in three blind trusts. Some 58% of his 2010 earnings—$12.6 million—were long-term capital gains, taxed at 15%.