In an interview with the Huffington Post, Mitt Romney sought to correct a misconception — that his long tenure as co-founder of financial firm Bain Capital makes him a “Wall Street guy.” As Romney explains it, this is not true.
“I don’t believe any of the funding came from Wall Street, meaning from investment banks or the like,” said Romney.
(He did say later in the interview, though, that Bain would likely not make such records public: “I don’t know that the Bain people would disclose their investors.”)
“Our funding came from individuals, and then ultimately we got funding from a church pension fund, endowments — I think our largest single investor group were endowments, colleges,” Romney explained. “And then we used those funds to either start businesses, venture capital, or to try and buy businesses in trouble and make them stronger. That’s not technically Wall Street, that’s not an investment banking function, but it is financial services.”
He also said: “I am not going to be the technical divider of what’s Wall Street or not. Wall Street is typically thought of as investment banking and banking and we were not an investment bank or a bank. But we were in the financial services sector generally.
“I am not a Wall Street guy, classically defined, but I am not going to quibble over definitions.”
