Vulture Capitalists are Strangling Retail

It's not just online shopping that's closing retail chains at a rate four times the closure rate last year. It's also vulture capitalists (Mitt Romney's peeps) who are responsible.

More than half the [bankruptcy] filings year to date have come from retailers that were previously purchased by private equity firms, according to AlixPartners. That's up from an average 31 percent over the prior five years.

These transactions, known as leveraged buyouts, occur when a private equity firm uses a combination of equity and debt to purchase a firm — saddling the company with debt in the process.

President Asterisk has been taking credit for every uptick in the stock market since the day of the election. But no doubt that he'd blame this on someone else.