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Agreed - LBO’s are a tool - neither good or bad. So what metrics should we choose to judge Bain’s use of it?

I think net jobs is fair / reasonable. Also ROI seems reasonable. I’m not wowed by an anecdotal evidence to tug on the heartstrings without any context.

Yours is a fair perspective but that’s not what I think is going on in the majority of anti-Bain/Romeny-Bain comments here.

In the case of LBO's, one would have to say that it is the entrepreneurs who created, risked and, for many years, provided jobs in many of the industries which Bain and other such companies became involved with who are true private sector heroes.

It is not the bankers and venture capitalists who rushed in to "save" them, sometimes only to take their own cut of the money and leave a percentage of them to go bankrupt anyway.

Now, if a true entrepreneur who invested his savings, started a Widget Manufacturing Company, and provided jobs to a few or hundreds of fellow citizens runs for President, then he deserves kudos for that courageous risk-taking action. To be fair, the Romney experience with Bain is not exactly a true freedom of individual enterprise example.

So what metrics should we choose to judge Bain’s use of it?

I think net jobs is fair / reasonable. Also ROI seems reasonable. I’m not wowed by an anecdotal evidence to tug on the heartstrings without any context.

Right, I'm not caring about bleeding heart anecdotes either. Though assessing the success of an operation like Bain Capital is difficult to meaningfully quantify. Because so much of the eventual success/failure of the firms they were involved with, would be dependent on factors presumably beyond Bain's control—such as having good executives in charge, etc. Also we'd have to figure out what sort of timelines to range the question in—are we looking at how a given firm did 5, 10, or more years down the line? So on, so forth.

Which also figures into why I think it's better to scrutinize Romney's "private sector experience" from the POV of: How much real-world field experience does he have running a competitive firm in a dynamic marketplace, where he's having to produce something tangible, deal with hiring/firing workers, etc?

I realize financial instruments are products too, of course, but is this the sort of bona fide private sector experience, where someone can honestly say they have an immersive, pragmatic, working knowledge of how the real economy operates? I'm skeptical that someone accustomed to dealing in the more abstract layers of finance, would have a reliable grasp on these matters.