Coordinates	40°26′30″N80°00′00″N
Name	Wall Street
Direction a	West
Terminus a	Broadway in Manhattan
Direction b	East
Terminus b	South Street in Manhattan
System	}}

Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or signifying New York-based financial interests. It is the home of the New York Stock Exchange, the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies. Several other major exchanges have or had headquarters in the Wall Street area, including NASDAQ, the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Board of Trade, and the former American Stock Exchange. Anchored by Wall Street, New York City is one of the world's principal financial centers.

History

Early years

There are varying accounts about how the Dutch-named "de Waal Straat" got its name. A generally accepted version is that the name of the street name was derived from an earthen wall on the northern boundary of the New Amsterdam settlement, perhaps to protect against English colonial encroachment or incursions by native Americans. A conflicting explanation is that Wall Street was named after ''Walloons'' -- possibly a Dutch abbreviation for ''Walloon'' being ''Waal''. Among the first settlers that embarked on the ship "Nieu Nederlandt" in 1624 were 30 Walloon families.

In the 1640s, basic picket and plank fences denoted plots and residences in the colony. Later, on behalf of the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant, using both African slaves and white colonists, collaborated with the city government in the construction of a more substantial fortification, a strengthened wall. In 1685 surveyors laid out Wall Street along the lines of the original stockade. The wall started at Pearl Street, which was the shoreline at that time, crossing the Indian path Broadway and ending at the other shoreline (today's Trinity Place), where it took a turn south and ran along the shore until it ended at the old fort. In these early days, local merchants and traders would gather at disparate spots to buy and sell shares and bonds, and over time divided themselves into two classes—auctioneers and dealers. The rampart was removed in 1699.

In the late 18th century, there was a buttonwood tree at the foot of Wall Street under which traders and speculators would gather to trade securities. The benefit was being in close proximity to each other. In 1792, traders formalized their association with the Buttonwood Agreement which was the origin of the New York Stock Exchange. The idea of the agreement was to make the market more "structured" and "without the manipulative auctions", with a commission structure. Persons signing the agreement agreed to charge each other a standard commission rate; persons not signing could still participate but would be charged a higher commission for dealing.

In 1789, Wall Street was the scene of the United States' first presidential inauguration when George Washington took the oath of office on the balcony of Federal Hall on April 30, 1789. This was also the location of the passing of the Bill Of Rights. In the cemetery of Trinity Church, Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Treasury secretary and "architect of the early United States financial system," is buried.

Nineteenth century

In the first few decades, both residences and businesses occupied the area, but increasingly business predominated. "There are old stories of people's houses being surrounded by the clamor of business and trade and the owners complaining that they can't get anything done," according to a historian named Burrows. The opening of the Erie Canal in the early 19th century meant a huge boom in business for New York City, since it was the only major eastern seaport which had direct access by inland waterways to ports on the Great Lakes. Wall Street became the "money capital of America".

Historian Charles R. Geisst suggested that there has constantly been a "tug-of-war" between business interests on Wall Street and authorities in Washington, D.C.. Generally during the 19th century Wall Street developed its own "unique personality and institutions" with little outside interference.

In the 1840s and 1850s, most residents moved north to midtown because of the increased business use at the lower tip of the island. The Civil War had the effect of causing the northern economy to boom, bringing greater prosperity to cities like New York which "came into its own as the nation's banking center" connecting "Old World capital and New World ambition", according to one account. J. P. Morgan created giant trusts; John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil moved to New York. Between 1860 and 1920, the economy changed from "agricultural to industrial to financial" and New York maintained its leadership position despite these changes, according to historian Thomas Kessner. New York was second only to London as the world's financial capital.

In 1884, Charles H. Dow began tracking stocks, initially beginning with 11 stocks, mostly railroads, and looked at average prices for these eleven. When the average "peaks and troughs" went up consistently, he deemed it a bull market condition; if averages dropped, it was a bear market. He added up prices, and divided by the number of stocks to get his Dow Jones average. Dow's numbers were a "convenient benchmark" for analyzing the market and became an accepted way to look at the entire stock market.

In 1889, the original stock report, ''Customers' Afternoon Letter'', became ''The Wall Street Journal''. Named in reference to the actual street, it became an influential international daily business newspaper published in New York City. After October 7, 1896, it began publishing Dow's expanded list of stocks. A century later, there were 30 stocks in the average.

Twentieth century

Historian John Brooks in his book ''Once in Golconda'' considered the turn of the 20th century period to have been Wall Street's ''heyday''. The address of 23 Wall Street where the headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Company, known as ''The Corner'', was "the precise center, geographical as well as metaphorical, of financial America and even of the financial world."

Wall Street has had changing relationships with government authorities. In 1913, for example, when authorities proposed a $4 tax on stock transfers, stock clerks protested. At other times, city and state officials have taken steps through tax incentives to encourage financial firms to continue to do business in the city.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the corporate culture of New York was a primary center for the construction of skyscrapers, and was rivaled only by Chicago on the American continent. There were also residential sections, such as the Bowling Green section between Broadway and the Hudson river, and between Vesey Street and the Battery. The Bowling Green area was described as "Wall Street's back yard" with poor people, high infant mortality rates, and the "worst housing conditions in the city." As a result of the construction, looking at New York City from the east, one can see two distinct clumps of tall buildings—the financial district on the left, and the taller midtown district on the right. The geology of Manhattan is well-suited for tall buildings, with a solid mass of bedrock underneath Manhattan providing a firm foundation for tall buildings. Skyscrapers are expensive to build, but when there is a "short supply of land" in a "desirable location", then building upwards makes sound financial sense. A post office was built at 60 Wall Street in 1905. During the World War I years, occasionally there were fund-raising efforts for projects such as the National Guard.

On September 16, 1920, close to the corner of Wall and Broad Street, the busiest corner of the financial district and across the offices of the Morgan Bank, a powerful bomb exploded. It killed 38 and seriously injured 143 people. The perpetrators were never identified or apprehended. The explosion did, however, help fuel the Red Scare that was underway at the time. A report from the ''New York Times'':

The area was subjected to numerous threats; one bomb threat in 1921 led to detectives sealing off the area to "prevent a repetition of the Wall Street bomb explosion."

Regulation

In October 1929, a celebrated Yale economist named Irving Fisher reassured worried investors that their "money was safe" on Wall Street. A few days later, stock values plummeted. The stock market crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression in which a quarter of working people were unemployed, with soup kitchens, mass foreclosures of farms, and falling prices. During this era, development of the financial district stagnated, and Wall Street "paid a heavy price" and "became something of a backwater in American life." During the New Deal years as well as the forties, there was much less focus on Wall Street and finance. The government clamped down on the practice of buying equities based only on credit, but these policies began to ease. From 1946-1947, stocks could not be purchased "on margin", meaning that an investor had to pay 100% of a stock's cost without taking on any loans. But this margin requirement was reduced four times before 1960, each time stimulating a mini-rally and boosting volume, and when the Federal Reserve reduced the margin requirements from 90% to 70%. These changes made it somewhat easier for investors to buy stocks on credit. The growing national economy and prosperity led to a recovery during the sixties, with some down years during the early seventies in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Trading volumes climbed; in 1967, according to ''Time Magazine'', volume hit 7.5 million shares a day which caused a "traffic jam" of paper with "batteries of clerks" working overtime to "clear transactions and update customer accounts."

In 1973, the financial community posted a collective loss of $245 million and needed help, and got it with the form of temporary help from the goverrnment. Reforms happened; the SEC eliminated fixed commissions which forced "brokers to compete freely with one another for investors' business." In 1975, the Securities & Exchange Commission threw out the NYSE's "Rule 394" which had required that "most stock transactions take place on the Big Board's floor", in effect freeing up trading for electronic methods. In 1976, banks were allowed to buy and sell stocks, which provided more competition for stockbrokers. Reforms had the effect of lowering prices overall, making it easier for more people to participate in the stock market. Broker commissions for each stock sale lessened, but volume increased.

The Reagan years were marked by a renewed push for capitalism, business, with national efforts to de-regulate industries such as telecommunications and aviation. The economy resumed upward growth after a period in the early eighties of languishing. A report in the ''New York Times'' described that the flushness of money and growth during these years had spawned a drug culture of sorts, with a rampant acceptance of cocaine use although the overall percent of actual users was most likely small. A reporter wrote:

In 1987, the stock market plunged and, in the relatively brief recession following, lower Manhattan lost 100,000 jobs according to one estimate. Since telecommunications costs were coming down, banks and brokerage firms could move away from Wall Street to more affordable locations. The recession of 1990–1991 were marked by office vacancy rates downtown which were "persistently high" and with some buildings "standing empty." The day of the drop, October 20, was marked by "stony-faced traders whose sense of humor had abandoned them and in the exhaustion of stock exchange employees struggling to maintain orderly trading." Ironically, it was the same year that Oliver Stone's movie ''Wall Street'' appeared. In 1995, city authorities offered the ''Lower Manhattan Revitalization Plan'' which offered incentives to convert commercial properties to residential use.

Construction of the World Trade Center began in 1966 but had trouble attracting tenants when completed. Nonetheless, some substantial firms purchased space there. It's impressive height helped make it a visual landmark for drivers and pedestrians. In some respects, the nexus of the financial district moved from the ''street'' of Wall Street to Trade Center complex. Real estate growth during the latter part of the 1990s was significant, with deals and new projects happening in the financial district and elsewhere in Manhattan; one firm invested more than $24 billion in various projects, many in the Wall Street area. In 1998, the NYSE and the city struck a $900 million deal which kept the NYSE from moving across the river to Jersey City; the deal was described as the "largest in city history to prevent a corporation from leaving town". A competitor to the NYSE, NASDAQ, moved its headquarters from Washington to New York.

Twenty-first century

In the first year of the new century, the ''Big Board'', as some termed the NYSE, was described as the world's "largest and most prestigious stock market." But when the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11th, it left an architectural void as new developments since the 1970s had played off the complex aesthetically. The attacks "crippled" the communications network. One estimate was that 45% of Wall Street's "best office space" had been lost. The physical destruction was immense:

Still, the NYSE was determined to re-open on September 17, almost a week after the attack. The attack hastened a trend towards financial firms moving to midtown and contributed to the loss of business on Wall Street, due to temporary-to-permanent relocation to New Jersey and further decentralization with establishments transferred to cities like Chicago, Denver, and Boston.

After September 11, the financial services industry went through a downturn with a sizable drop in year-end bonuses of $6.5 billion, according to one estimate from a state comptroller's office. Many brokers are paid mostly through commission, and get a token annual salary which is dwarfed by the year-end bonus.

To guard against a vehicular bombing in the area, authorities built concrete barriers, and found ways over time to make them more aesthetically appealing by spending $5000 to $8000 apiece on ''bollards'':

Wall Street itself and the Financial District as a whole are crowded with highrises. Further, the loss of the World Trade Center has spurred development on a scale that hadn't been seen in decades. In 2006, Goldman Sachs began building a tower near the former Trade Center site. Tax incentives provided by federal, state and local governments encouraged development. A new World Trade Center complex, centered on Daniel Liebeskind's Memory Foundations plan, is in the early stages of development and one building has already been replaced. The centerpiece to this plan is the tall 1 World Trade Center (formerly known as the Freedom Tower). New residential buildings are sprouting up, and buildings that were previously office space are being converted to residential units, also benefiting from tax incentives. A new Fulton Street Transit Center is planned to improve access. In 2007, the Maharishi Global Financial Capital of New York opened headquarters at 70 Broad Street near the NYSE, in an effort to seek investors.

''The Guardian'' reporter Andrew Clark described the years of 2006 to 2010 as "tumultous" in which the heartland of America is "mired in gloom" with high unemployment around 9.6%, with average house prices falling from $230,000 in 2006 to $183,000, and foreboding increases in the national debt to $13.4 trillion, but that despite the setbacks, the American economy was once more "bouncing back." What had happened during these heady years? Clark wrote:

The first months of 2008 was a particularly troublesome period which caused Federal Reserve chairman Benjamin Bernanke to "work holidays and weekends" and which did an "extraordinary series of moves." It bolstered U.S. banks and allowed Wall Street firms to borrow "directly from the Fed." These efforts were highly controversial at the time, but from the perspective of 2010, it appeared the Federal exertions had been the right decisions. By 2010, Wall Street firms, in Clark's view, were "getting back to their old selves as engine rooms of wealth, prosperity and excess." A report by Michael Stoler in ''The New York Sun'' described a "phoenix-like resurrection" of the area, with residential, commercial, retail and hotels booming in the "third largest business district in the country." At the same time, the investment community was worried about proposed legal reforms, including the ''Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act'' which dealt with matters such as credit card rates and lending requirements. The NYSE closed two of its trading floors in a move towards transforming itself into an electronic exchange.

Buildings: Physical layout

Wall Street's architecture is generally rooted in the Gilded Age, though there are also some art deco influences in the neighborhood. The layout of streets doesn't have the rectangular grid pattern typical of midtown Manhattan, but small streets "barely wide enough for a single lane of traffic are bordered on both sides by some of the tallest buildings in the city", according to one description, which creates "breathtaking artificial canyons" offering spectacular views in some instances. Construction in such narrow steep areas has resulted in occasional accidents such as a crane collapse. One report divided lower Manhattan into three basic districts:

# The financial district proper—particularly along John Street # South of the World Trade Center area—the handful of blocks south of the World Trade Center along Greenwich, Washington and West Streets # Seaport district—characterized by century-old low-rise buildings and South Street Seaport; the seaport is "quiet, residential, and has an old world charm" according to one description.

Landmark buildings on Wall Street include Federal Hall, 14 Wall Street (Bankers Trust Company Building), 40 Wall Street (The Trump Building) the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Broad Street and the US headquarters of Deutsche Bank at 60 Wall Street. The Deutsche Bank building (formerly the J.P Morgan headquarters) is the last remaining major investment bank to still have its headquarters on Wall Street.

The older skyscrapers often were built with elaborate facades; such elaborate aesthetics haven't been common in corporate architecture for decades. The World Trade Center, built in the 1970s, was very plain and utilitarian in comparison (the Twin Towers were often criticized as looking like two big boxes, despite their impressive height). Excavation from the World Trade Center was later used by Battery Park City residential development as landfill. 23 Wall Street was built in 1914 and was known as the "House of Morgan" and served for decades as the bank's headquarters and, by some accounts, was viewed as an important address in American finance.

A key anchor for the area is, of course, the New York Stock Exchange. City authorities realize its importance, and believed that it has "outgrown its neoclassical temple at the corner of Wall and Broad streets", and in 1998 offered substantial tax incentives to try to keep it in the financial district. Plans to rebuild it were delayed by the events of 2001. In 2011, the exchange still occupies the same site. The exchange is the locus for an impressive amount of technology and data. For example, to accommodate the three thousand persons who work directly on the Exchange floor requires 3,500 kilowatts of electricity, along with 8,000 phone circuits on the trading floor alone, and 200 miles of fiber-optic cable below ground.

Personalities: players and deal-makers

Persons associated with Wall Street have become famous. Although their reputations are usually limited to members of the stock brokerage and banking communities, several have gained national and international fame. Some earned their fame for their investment strategies, financing, reporting, legal or regulatory skills, while others are remembered for their greed. One of the most iconic representations of the market prosperity is the ''Charging Bull'' sculpture, by Arturo Di Modica. Representing the bull market economy, the sculpture was originally placed in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and subsequently moved to its current location in Bowling Green.

Wall Street's culture is often criticized as being rigid. This is a decades-old stereotype stemming from the Wall Street establishment's protection of its interests, and the link to the WASP establishment. More recent criticism has centered on structural problems and lack of a desire to change well-established habits. Wall Street's establishment resists government oversight and regulation. At the same time, New York City has a reputation as a very bureaucratic city, which makes entry into the neighborhood difficult or even impossible for middle class entrepreneurs. The ethnic background of Wall Streeters remains largely unchanged since the days of the railway barons of the early 20th century, as documented by their portraits in the Wall+Broad chapter of The Corners Project

Several well known Wall Street individuals include John Meriwether, John Briggs, Michael Bloomberg, and Warren Buffett (All affiliated at one time or another with the firm Salomon Brothers), as well as Bernie Madoff, and numerous others.

Many talented financiers and bankers worked for Wasserstein Perella & Co. during the 1980s.

The now defunct investment bank of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette had numerous talented people working there including people such as William Donaldson who served in the Nixon administration, as well as Ken Moelis, Bennett Goodman, Herald "Hal" Ritch, Joel Cohen, Safra A. Catz who became president of Oracle Corporation, Tom Dean, Larry Schloss, Michael Connelly, and others.

Wall Street as a financial center

Wall Street in the New York economy

Finance professor Charles R. Geisst wrote that the exchange has become "inextricably intertwined into New York's economy". Wall Street pay, in terms of salaries and bonuses and taxes, is an important part of the economy of New York City, the tri-state metropolitan area, and the United States. In 2008, after a downturn in the stock market, the decline meant $18 billion less in taxable income, with less money available for "apartments, furniture, cars, clothing and services". A falloff in Wall Street's economy could have "wrenching effects on the local and regional economies".

Estimates vary about the number and quality of financial jobs in the city. One estimate was that Wall Street firms employed close to 200,000 persons in 2008. Another estimate was that in 2007, the financial services industry which had a $70 billion profit became 22 percent of the city's revenue. Another estimate (in 2006) was that the financial services industry makes up 9% of the city's work force and 31% of the tax base. An additional estimate (2007) from Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute was that the securities industry accounts for 4.7 percent of the jobs in New York City but 20.7 percent of its wages, and he estimated there were 175,000 securities-industries jobs in New York (both Wall Street area and midtown) paying an average of $350,000 annually. Between 1995 and 2005, the sector grew at an annual rate of about 6.6% annually, a respectable rate, but that other financial centers were growing faster. Another estimate (2008) was that Wall Street provided a fourth of all personal income earned in the city, and 10% of New York City's tax revenue.

The seven largest Wall Street firms in the first decade of the 21st century were Bear Stearns, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup Incorporated, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. During the recession of 2008–2010, many of these firms went out of business or were bought up at firesale prices by other financial firms. In 2008, Lehman filed for bankruptcy, Bear Stearns was bought up by JP Morgan Chase with blessing by the U.S. government, and Merrill Lynch was bought up by Bank of America. These failures marked a catastrophic downsizing of Wall Street as the financial industry goes through restructuring and change. Since New York's financial industry provides almost one-fourth of all income produced in the city, and accounts for 10% of the city's tax revenues and 20% of the state's, the downturn has had huge repercussions for government treasuries. New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly over a four year period dangled over $100 million in tax incentives to persuade Goldman Sachs to build a 43-story headquarters in the financial district near the destroyed World Trade Center site. In 2009, things looked somewhat gloomy, with one analysis by the Boston Consulting Group suggesting that 65,000 jobs had been permanently lost because of the downturn. But there were signs that Manhattan property prices were rebounding with price rises of 9% annually in 2010, and bonuses were being paid once more, with average bonuses over $124,000 in 2010. The U.S. banking industry employes 1.86 million people and earned profits of $22 billion in the second quarter of 2010, up substantially from previous quarters.

Wall Street versus Midtown Manhattan

A requirement of the New York Stock Exchange was that brokerage firms had to have offices "clustered around Wall Street" so clerks could deliver physical paper copies of stock certificates each week. There were some indications that midtown had been becoming the locus of financial services dealings even by 1911. But as technology progressed, in the middle and later decades of the 20th century, computers and telecommunications replaced paper notifications, meaning that the close proximity requirement could be bypassed in more situations. Many financial firms found that they could move to midtown Manhattan four miles away or elsewhere and still operate effectively. For example, the former investment firm of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette was described as a ''Wall Street firm'' but had its headquarters on Park Avenue in midtown. A report described the migration from Wall Street:

Nevertheless, a key magnet for the Wall Street remains the New York Stock Exchange. Some "old guard" firms such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch (bought by Bank of America in 2009), have remained "fiercely loyal to the financial district" location, and new ones such as Deutsche Bank have chosen office space in the district. So-called "face–to–face" trading between buyers and sellers remains a "cornerstone" of the NYSE, with a benefit of having all of a deal's players close at hand, including investment bankers, lawyers, and accountants.

In 2011, the Manhattan Financial District is one of the largest business districts in the United States, and second in New York City only to Midtown in terms of dollar volume of business transacted.

Wall Street as a neighborhood

During most of the 20th century, Wall Street was a business community with practically only offices which emptied out at night. A report in the ''New York Times'' in 1961 described a "deathlike stillness that settles on the district after 5:30 and all day Saturday and Sunday." But there has been a change towards greater residential use of the area, pushed forwards by technological changes and shifting market conditions. The general pattern is for several hundred thousand workers to commute into the area during the day, sometimes by sharing a taxicab from other parts of the city as well as from New Jersey and Long Island, and then leave at night. In 1970, only 833 people lived "south of Chambers Street"; by 1990; 13,782 people were residents with the addition of areas such as Battery Park City and Southbridge Towers. Battery Park City was built on 92 acres of landfill, and 3,000 people moved there beginning about 1982, but by 1986 there was evidence of more shops and stores and a park, along with plans for more residential development.

According to one description in 1996, "The area dies at night ... It needs a neighborhood, a community." During the past two decades there has been a shift towards greater residential living areas in the Wall Street area, with incentives from city authorities in some instances. Many empty office buildings have been converted to lofts and apartments; for example, the office building where Harry Sinclair, the oil magnate involved with the Teapot Dome scandal, was converted to a co-op in 1979. In 1996, a fifth of buildings and warehouses were empty, and many were converted to living areas. Some conversions met with problems, such as aging gargoyles on building exteriors having to be expensively restored to meet with current building codes. Residents in the area have sought to have a supermarket, a movie theater, a pharmacy, more schools, and a "good diner". The discount retailer named ''Job Lot'' used to be located at the World Trade Center but moved to Church Street; merchants bought extra unsold items at steep prices and sold them as a discount to consumers and shoppers included "thrifty homemakers and browsing retirees" who "rubbed elbows with City Hall workers and Wall Street executives"; but the firm went bust in 1993. There were reports that the number of residents increased by 60% during the 1990s to about 25,000 although a second estimate (based on the 2000 census based on a different map) places the residential (nighttime and weekend) population in 2000 at 12,042. By 2001, there were several grocery stores, dry cleaners, and two grade schools and a top high school. There is a barber shop across from the New York Stock Exchange which has been there a long time. By 2001, there were more signs of dogwalkers at night and a 24-hour neighborhood, although the general pattern of crowds during the working hours and emptiness at night was still apparent. There were ten hotels and thirteen museums by 2001. Stuyvesant High School moved to its present location near Battery Park City in 1992 and has been described as one of the nation's premier high schools with emphasis on science and mathematics. In 2007, the French fashion retailer Hermès opened a store in the financial district to sell items such as a "$4,700 custom-made leather dressage saddle or a $47,000 limited edition alligator briefcase." Some streets have been designated as pedestrian–only with vehicular traffic prohibited at some times. There are reports of panhandlers like elsewhere in the city. By 2010, the residential population had increased to 24,400 residents with crime statistics showing no murders in 2010. The area is growing with luxury high-end apartments and upscale retailers.

Wall Street as a tourist destination

Wall Street is a major location of tourism in New York City. One report described lower Manhattan as "swarming with camera-carrying tourists". Tour guides highlight places such as Trinity Church, the Federal Reserve gold vaults 80 feet below street level (worth $100 billion), and the NYSE. A ''Scoundrels of Wall Street Tour'' is a walking historical tour which includes a museum visit and discussion of various financiers "who were adept at finding ways around finance laws or loopholes through them". Occasionally artists make impromptu performances; for example, in 2010, a troupe of 22 dancers "contort their bodies and cram themselves into the nooks and crannies of the Financial District in ''Bodies in Urban Spaces''" choreographed by Willi Donner. One chief attraction, the Federal Reserve Building in lower Manhattan, paid $750,000 to open a visitors' gallery in 1997. The New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange also spent money in the late 1990s to upgrade facilities for visitors. Attractions include the gold vault beneath the Federal Reserve and that "staring down at the trading floor was as exciting as going to the Statue of Liberty."

Wall Street versus Main Street

As a figure of speech contrasted to "Main Street", the term "Wall Street" can refer to big business interests against those of small business and the working of middle class. It is sometimes used more specifically to refer to research analysts, shareholders, and financial institutions such as investment banks. Whereas "Main Street" conjures up images of locally owned businesses and banks, the phrase "Wall Street" is commonly used interchangeably with the phrase "Corporate America". It is also sometimes used in contrast to distinguish between the interests, culture, and lifestyles of investment banks and those of Fortune 500 industrial or service corporations.

Wall Street in the public imagination

Wall Street in a conceptual sense represents financial and economic power. To Americans, it can sometimes represent elitism and power politics, and its role has been a source of controversy throughout the nation's history, particularly beginning around the Gilded Age period in the late 19th century. Wall Street became the symbol of a country and economic system that many Americans see as having developed through trade, capitalism, and innovation.

Wall Street has become synonymous with financial interests, often used negatively. During the mortgage mess from 2007–2010, Wall Street financing was blamed as one of the causes, although most commentators blame an interplay of factors. The U.S. government with the Troubled Asset Relief Program bailed out the banks and financial backers with billions of dollars, but the bailout was often criticized as politically motivated, and was criticized by journalists as well as the public. Analyst Robert Kuttner in the ''Huffington Post'' criticized the bailout as helping large Wall Street firms such as Citigroup while neglecting to help smaller community development banks such as Chicago's ShoreBank. One writer in the ''Huffington Post'' looked at FBI statistics on robbery, fraud, and crime and concluded that Wall Street was the "most dangerous neighborhood in the United States" if one factored in the $50 billion fraud perpetrated by Bernie Madoff. When large firms such as Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing were found guilty of fraud, Wall Street was often blamed, even though these firms had headquarters around the nation and not in Wall Street. Many complained that the resulting Sarbanes-Oxley legislation dampened the business climate with regulations that were "overly burdensome." Interest groups seeking favor with Washington lawmakers, such as car dealers, have often sought to portray their interests as allied with ''Main Street'' rather than ''Wall Street'', although analyst Peter Overby on ''National Public Radio'' suggested that car dealers have written over $250 billion in consumer loans and have real ties with ''Wall Street''. When the United States Treasury bailed out large financial firms, to ostensibly halt a downward spiral in the nation's economy, there was tremendous negative political fallout, particularly when reports came out that monies supposed to be used to ease credit restrictions were being used to pay bonuses to highly-paid employees. Analyst William D. Cohan argued that it was "obscene" how Wall Street reaped "massive profits and bonuses in 2009" after being saved by "trillions of dollars of American taxpayers' treasure" despite Wall Street's "greed and irresponsible risk-taking." ''Washington Post'' reporter Suzanne McGee called for Wall Street to make a sort of public apology to the nation, and expressed dismay that people such as Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein hadn't expressed contrition despite being sued by the SEC in 2009. McGee wrote that "Bankers aren't the sole culprits, but their too-glib denials of responsibility and the occasional vague and waffling expression of regret don't go far enough to deflect anger."

But chief banking analyst at Goldman Sachs, Richard Ramsden, is "unapologetic" and sees "banks as the dynamos that power the rest of the economy." Ramsden believes "risk-taking is vital" and said in 2010:

Others in the financial industry believe they've been unfairly castigated by the public and by politicians. For example, Anthony Scaramucci reportedly told President Barack Obama in 2010 that he felt like a piñata, "whacked with a stick" by "hostile politicians".

The financial misdeeds of various figures throughout American history sometimes casts a dark shadow on financial investing as a whole, and include names such as William Duer, Jim Fisk and Jay Gould (the latter two believed to have been involved with an effort to collapse the U.S. gold market in 1869) as well as modern figures such as Bernard Madoff who "bilked billions from investors".

In addition, images of Wall Street and its figures have loomed large. The 1987 Oliver Stone film ''Wall Street'' created the iconic figure of Gordon Gekko who used the phrase "greed is good", which caught on in the cultural parlance. According to one account, the Gekko character was a "straight lift" from the real world junk-bond dealer Michael Milkin, who later pled guilty to felony charges for violating securities laws. Stone commented in 2009 how the movie had had an unexpected cultural influence, not causing them to turn away from corporate greed, but causing many young people to choose Wall Street careers because of that movie. A reporter repeated other lines from the film:

Wall Street firms have however also contributed to projects such as Habitat for Humanity as well as done food programs in Haiti and trauma centers in Sudan and rescue boats during floods in Bangladesh.

Wall Street in popular culture

Herman Melville's classic short story ''Bartleby, the Scrivener'' is subtitled ''A Story of Wall Street'' and provides an excellent portrayal of a kind and wealthy lawyer's struggle to reason with that which is unreasonable as he is pushed beyond his comfort zone to "feel" something real for humanity.

In William Faulkner's novel ''The Sound and the Fury'', Jason Compson hits on other perceptions of Wall Street: after finding some of his stocks are doing poorly, he blames "the Jews."

The film ''Die Hard with a Vengeance'' has a plot involving thieves breaking into the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and stealing most of the gold bullion stored underground by driving dump trucks through a nearby Wall Street subway station.

Many events of Tom Wolfe's ''Bonfire of the Vanities'' center on Wall Street and its culture.

On January 26, 2000, the band Rage Against The Machine filmed the music video for "Sleep Now in the Fire" on Wall Street, which was directed by Michael Moore. The band at one point stormed the Stock Exchange, causing the doors of the Exchange to be closed early (2:52 P.M.). Trading on the Exchange floor, however, continued uninterrupted. The 1987 film ''Wall Street'' and its 2010 sequel exemplify many popular conceptions of Wall Street, being a tale of shady corporate dealings and insider trading.

"Wallstreet Kingdom" is a controversial fashion brand promoting capitalism and bonuses on Wall Street.

In the film National Treasure a clue to finding the Templar Treasure leads the main characters to Wall Street's Trinity Church.

TNA Wrestler Robert Roode is billed from "Wall Street in Manhattan, New York."

Bret Easton Ellis's novel ''American Psycho'' follows the day-to-day life of Wall Street investment banker and serial killer Patrick Bateman.

In the video game Grand Theft Auto IV in the fictional Liberty City Wall Street is a district dubbed ''The Exchange''.

Battles 2011 album Gloss Drop contains a song titled "Wall Street."

Competitors to Wall Street

During much of the 20th century, the United States and its financial capital of New York City were the leaders. But over the past few decades, with the rise of a multipolar world with new regional powers and global capitalism, numerous financial centers have challenged Wall Street's predominance, particularly from Asia which some analysts believe will be the focus of new worldwide growth. New York still has strengths in having a "concentration of finance professionals" -- prime brokers, large banks, traders, lawyers, accountants, and private bankers. One analyst suggested the prime factors for success as a financial city were three:

# a pool of money to lend or invest # a decent legal framework # high-quality human resources

London. Reports suggest that the City of London has overtaken New York as a financial capital with better regulation. London's merger volume was higher than New York's by $79 billion in 2005 and equity issuance was $130 billion versus $105 billion in the United States. Companies seeking to list their stocks have started going to London before New York. There is a perception that "regulatory scrutiny is more burdensome in the United States than in London" and which has a "transparent and reliable legal system." One report was that London's location between Asia and the U.S. meant that it was often suitable in terms of time zones. With multinationals sending their employees there; one estimate was there were 224,000 Americans in Britain in 2008.

Shanghai. Official efforts have been directed to making Pudong a financial leader by 2010. Efforts during the 1990s were mixed, but in the early 21st century, Shanghai gained ground. Factors such as a "protective banking sector" and a "highly restricted capital market" have held the city back, according to one analysis in 2009 in ''China Daily''. Shanghai has done well in terms of market capitalization but it needs to "attract an army of money managers, lawyers, accountants, actuaries, brokers and other professionals, Chinese and foreign," to enable it to compete with New York and London. China is generating tremendous new capital, which makes it easier to stage initial public offerings of state-owned companies in places like Shanghai.

Hong Kong. In 2010, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange raised nearly $53 billion for initial public offerings, compared with only $42 billion for the U.S. and $16 billion (£10 billion) in London. Hong Kong was the site of the world's largest I.P.O. in 2006 of the $19.1 billion Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. Hedge funds are doing well in Hong Kong with increased growth from 2006 to 2010. One estimate in 2009 was that the Hong Kong stock market was the world's seventh largest and noted that 70 percent of the world's 100 largest banks were based in the city.

Tokyo. One report suggests that Japanese authorities are working on plans to transform Tokyo but have met with mixed success, noting that "initial drafts suggest that Japan’s economic specialists are having trouble figuring out the secret of the Western financial centers’ success." Efforts include more English-speaking restaurants and services and earthquake-resistant offices, but that have neglected more powerful stimuli such as lower taxes and a deep-seated aversion to finance.

Singapore. This city was mentioned as a competitor given its proximity to Asian markets.

Chicago. The Illinois city has the "world’s largest derivatives market" when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade merged in 2007.

Dubai. This city has been mentioned as a competitor as well.

Others. Cities such as São Paulo and Johannesburg and other "would-be hubs" lack liquidity and the "skills base," according to one source. Financial industries in countries and regions such as the Indian subcontinent, Korea and Malaysia require not only well-trained people but the "whole institutional infrastructure of laws, regulations, contracts, trust and disclosure" which takes time to happen.

''New York Times'' analyst Daniel Gross wrote:

An example is the alternative trading platform known as ''BATS'' based in Kansas City which came "out of nowhere to gain a 9 percent share in the market for trading United States stocks." The firm has computers in New Jersey, two salespersons in New York City, but the remaining 33 employees work in a center in Missouri.

Transportation

Wall Street being historically a commuter destination, much transportation infrastructure has been developed to serve it. Today, Pier 11 at the foot of the street is a busy terminal for New York Waterway and other ferries. The New York City subway has three stations under Wall Street:

Wall Street (IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue Line) at Wall Street & William Street

Wall Street (IRT Lexington Avenue Line) at Wall Street & Broadway

Broad Street (BMT Nassau Street Line) at Wall Street & Broad Street

Motor traffic, particularly during working hours, is often congested but driving late at night and on weekends can be easier. The roads are not arranged according to midtown's distinctive rectangular grid pattern with staggered lights, but have small often one-lane roads with numerous stoplights and stop signs. A highway runs along the East River and the Downtown Manhattan Heliport serves Wall Street.

See also

Wall Street Historic District (New York, New York)

Global settlement (2002)

Economy of New York City

Hard Hat Riot

Bay Street

City of London

List of financial districts

References

Further reading

Atwood, Albert W. and Erickson, Erling A. "Morgan, John Pierpont, (Apr. 17, 1837 – March 31, 1913)," in ''Dictionary of American Biography, Volume 7'' (1934)

Carosso, Vincent P. ''The Morgans: Private International Bankers, 1854–1913.'' Harvard U. Press, 1987. 888 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-58729-8

Carosso, Vincent P. ''Investment Banking in America: A History'' Harvard University Press (1970)

Chernow, Ron. ''The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance'', (2001) ISBN 0-8021-3829-2

Fraser, Steve. ''Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life'' HarperCollins (2005)

Geisst, Charles R. ''Wall Street: A History from Its Beginnings to the Fall of Enron.'' Oxford University Press. 2004. online edition

Moody, John. ''The Masters of Capital: A Chronicle of Wall Street'' Yale University Press, (1921) online edition

Morris, Charles R. ''The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy'' (2005) ISBN 978-0-8050-8134-3

Perkins, Edwin J. ''Wall Street to Main Street: Charles Merrill and Middle-class Investors'' (1999)

Sobel, Robert. ''The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market'' (1962)

Sobel, Robert. ''The Great Bull Market: Wall Street in the 1920s'' (1968)

Sobel, Robert. ''Inside Wall Street: Continuity & Change in the Financial District'' (1977)

Strouse, Jean. ''Morgan: American Financier.'' Random House, 1999. 796 pp. ISBN 978-0-679-46275-0

External links

New York Songlines: Wall Street, a virtual walking tour

Category:Article Feedback Pilot Category:Streets in Manhattan Category:Forts of New Netherland Category:Colonial forts in New York

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Coordinates	40°26′30″N80°00′00″N
Background	solo_singer
Name	Jackie Evancho
Birth name	Jacqueline Marie Evancho
Birth date	April 09, 2000
Origin	Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Voice type	Mezzo-soprano
Occupation	Singer
Instrument	Vocals, violin, piano
Label	SYCO (2010-present)Columbia (2010–present)
Years active	2009–present
Genre	Classical crossover
Website	}}

Jacqueline Marie "Jackie" Evancho ( ; born April 9, 2000) is an American singer. She gained popularity after performing in the fifth season of the ''America's Got Talent'' competition at the age of 10, and finishing in second place. With the subsequent release of her ''O Holy Night'' EP, she became the best-selling debut artist of 2010, and she went on the following year to contend for the top position on American album charts with her Sony Music debut, entitled "Dream With Me". In addition to performing vocal music, Evancho plays the violin and piano, and writes song lyrics. Evancho impressed musician David Foster with her large outpouring of original lyrics; and she co-wrote the title track on "Dream With Me", a record that Foster produced.

Early life

Evancho was born to Michael and Lisa Evancho. She has an older brother Jacob, a younger brother Zachary, and a younger sister Rachel. She resides in Richland Township, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Evancho started singing when she first watched the musical ''The Phantom of the Opera'' on DVD. Her mother heard her singing songs from the musical and allowed her to enter the 2008 Kean Idol, a local talent contest. She sang "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again", finishing, on the cusp of her 8th birthday, as first runner-up; the winner was 20 years old. Eventually Evancho participated in other talent contests and started a YouTube channel. She began taking vocal lessons for a short period of time when she was 8, in June 2008, after her success in the 2008 Kean Idol contest. She was also a member of the Children's Festival Chorus of Pittsburgh during its 2008–09 season.

Evancho competed in Las Vegas in the 15th annual U.S.A. World Showcase Talent Competition in early 2009, in which the winner received $100,000 and the opportunity to create a demo CD. She was invited to perform at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships in New York City, but due to scheduling conflicts with ''America's Got Talent'', she could not attend.

Career

''Prelude to a Dream''

In November 2009, Evancho released her independent debut album called ''Prelude to a Dream''. The album featured mainly covers of songs such as Andrea Bocelli's "Con te partirò" and "The Prayer", Josh Groban's "To Where You Are", Martina McBride's "Concrete Angel", and a rendition of "Amazing Grace" among others. The album debuted on The Billboard 200 at #121 on the chart dated August 28, 2010. It also debuted at #2 on iTunes and Billboard Classical Albums Chart. ''Prelude to a Dream'' is no longer marketed as of September 2010. Her father has given the following reason for the withdrawal:

Because the CD was recorded about a year and [a] half ago and her current voice no longer sounds like what it did then [due to vocal maturity...], we decided to withdraw ''Prelude to a Dream'' and will be concentrating on new material as part of her progress.

It has become a collector's item; copies of the CD have received final winning bids of over $1,500 on eBay auctions.

''America's Got Talent''

Evancho was accepted as a contestant on the fifth season of the ''America's Got Talent'' TV show by placing first in a YouTube competition sponsored by the television show. On August 10, 2010, Evancho performed "O mio babbino caro" by Giacomo Puccini. The aria is also on her debut album. She received a standing ovation after her performance, and she was awarded a trip to Universal Studios Florida for receiving the most fan votes from the submissions to the show from YouTube. However, after Evancho's performance, there were online accusations that her performance had been lip-synched. One judge, Howie Mandel, requested that Evancho sing a random voice exercise on the next evening's live show as proof that it was her voice that was heard. On that episode, it was also revealed that she had advanced to the semifinal round.

Her semifinal performance was Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman's "Time To Say Goodbye". She advanced to the Top 10, where on September 7, 2010, she performed "Pie Jesu" from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem and was voted into the Final 4.

Her final competition performance was her rendition of Charles Gounod's "Ave Maria" on September 14. On September 15, the season finale, Evancho performed "Time To Say Goodbye" with Sarah Brightman. At the end of the episode, Evancho was announced the runner-up, finishing second to Michael Grimm. Evancho performed in 10 of the 25 cities scheduled for the ''America's Got Talent'' road show.

''O Holy Night''

Evancho's first release on a major record label was a Columbia Records EP entitled ''O Holy Night''. It was released on November 16, 2010 and reached rank #1 on Amazon's bestsellers in music during pre-orders on October 19, 2010. It was ranked #3 for the entire year 2010 on Amazon. "O Holy Night" debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200, making her the top-selling debut artist for 2010, and the youngest female solo artist to debut in the top 10. Evancho also debuted at #1 on Billboard's Classical Albums Chart. The album has sold 381,000 copies in its first two weeks. 239,000 copies were sold in its first week and 142,000 in its second week. On December 10, 2010, the album was certified platinum by the RIAA with an excess of a million copies in the US, making her the youngest solo artist to go platinum. In Canada, it debuted at #1 on the Canadian Classical Albums Chart.

Evancho's first stop in promoting the album was on ''The Tonight Show with Jay Leno'' on September 23, 2010, where she gave her first late-night interview with Jay Leno. She appeared on ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'' on October 19, 2010 (the day of the EP's release) along with singers Susan Boyle and Debby Boone. During this appearance, she was asked with whom she wanted to perform a duet. She named Josh Groban, Charlotte Church, and Andrea Bocelli among the artists that she would like to collaborate with in the future, later adding Lady Gaga, also saying that writing is her favorite subject. She sang "Pie Jesu" during the show. The episode also showed tape that was shot by Oprah's crew at Evancho's home and school. Evancho performed on ''The Today Show'' on November 9, 2010 which also featured a brief interview.

Other performances

Evancho performed in the My Macy's Holiday Parade presented by WPXI in Pittsburgh on November 27. Evancho appeared in an episode of the final season of the ''Wizards of Waverly Place''. Her first music video is also being created.

She appeared on ''The View'' on November 15, 2010, and at about that time was ranked #1 on the British site Classical-Crossover.co.uk. "She is just truly blessed with a voice that's phenomenal", said composer and conductor Tim Janis, who invited Evancho to perform in his ''American Christmas Carol'' show on 2 December 2010 at Carnegie Hall in New York City. She would have been the youngest female vocal soloist ever to have performed there, but her parents withdrew her from the appearance some weeks prior to the date.

On November 30, 2010, Evancho sang "Silent Night" with Katherine Jenkins on NBC's Christmas Tree Lighting Special, "Christmas in Rockefeller Center".

On December 9, 2010, Evancho performed at the National Christmas Tree Lighting event in Washington, D.C., singing "O Holy Night".

She performed "Pie Jesu" on the 27th annual Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade which aired on ABC television December 25, 2010.

On January 1, 2011, Evancho performed the American national anthem at the NHL Winter Classic at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, while Steven Page performed the Canadian national anthem.

On February, 18, 2011, Evancho performed with the Houston Chamber Choir and on March 12, 2011 at the 2011 Festival of the Arts Boca along with the young stars of the Metropolitan Opera. Evancho performed during Muhammad Ali's "Celebrity Fight Night" charity event in Phoenix on March 19, 2011.

On March 29, 2011, it was officially announced that Evancho's second full-length feature album, ''Dream With Me'', would be released on June 14, 2011.

On June 4, 2011, she performed at the finale of ''Britain's Got Talent''.

Evancho has also commenced a series of performances with symphony orchestras, beginning with the Sun Valley Orchestra on July 31, followed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on August 5, and the Ravinia Festival Orchestra on August 7. Other planned performances include the Omaha Symphony Orchestra on August 26, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra on August 31, The Pittsburgh Opera on October 16, and a performance at Avery Fisher Hall in New York on November 7. Meantime she has produced a DVD entitled ''Dream With Me In Concert'', from her performance at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota.

Critical reception

Christopher Hahn, General Director of the Pittsburgh Opera said Evancho's performance of "O mio babbino caro" was "spellbinding". "It's very unusual for a young child to have a voice that sounded so rich and developed." "I thought she was just lovely, sweetly compelling." "She is compelling," said Hahn. "It is quite unusual to hear a young girl with that level of warmth and roundness." Hahn called Evancho's performance of Pie Jesu strong, with seamless delivery. "Her phrasing was lovely, which she needed for that piece."

Composer Tim Janis said "[Jackie's] voice is so pure and natural, there's no flaw in it. People say 'I can hear her potential coming,' but no, it's here, it's now." "She is just truly blessed with a voice that's phenomenal." ''America's Got Talent'' judge Piers Morgan said that Evancho has more talent than any act he has seen after witnessing her version of "Ave Maria": "I have never seen an act, on this show or the British show or any of the other talent shows in the world, with more potential than Jackie Evancho. That was perfection. Perfection!"

Claudia Benack, Assistant Professor of Musical Theater at Carnegie Mellon University said that "[Jackie] has an unusually adult feel for the repertoire...I think she's very good."

Etta Cox, a jazz singer and instructor from Pittsburgh, said: "Her voice just doesn't fit her body. I've never heard a voice like that in a 10-year-old, and I've been teaching voice for many years. The maturity of her voice is incredible for someone her age."

Discography

;Studio Albums

2009: ''Prelude to a Dream''

2011: ''Dream With Me''

;EPs

2010: ''O Holy Night''

;DVD

2011: ''Dream With Me In Concert''

References

External links

Jackie Evancho at Classical Crossover UK

Category:2000 births Category:21st-century American people Category:American child singers Category:American female singers Category:America's Got Talent contestants Category:American sopranos Category:Columbia Records artists Category:Living people Category:Musicians from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Category:Opera crossover singers Category:Participants in American reality television series Category:People from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

bg:Джаки Иванко de:Jackie Evancho es:Jackie Evancho fr:Jackie Evancho it:Jackie Evancho pt:Jackie Evancho ru:Иванко, Джеки sv:Jackie Evancho

Coordinates	40°26′30″N80°00′00″N
Name	Herman Cain
Office	Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City
Term start	1995
Term end	1996
Predecessor	Burton A. Dole, Jr
Successor	A. Drue Jennings
Office2	Deputy Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City
Term start2	1992
Term end2	1994
Predecessor2	Burton A. Dole, Jr
Successor2	A. Drue Jennings
Birth date	December 13, 1945
Birth place	Memphis, Tennessee, US
Residence	Sandy Springs, Georgia, US
Occupation	BusinessmanRadio hostColumnist
Party	Republican
Spouse	Gloria Cain
Children	Melanie Cain and Vincent Cain
Religion	National Baptist
Alma mater	Morehouse College (B.A.)Purdue University (M.S.)
Website	hermancain.com }}

Herman Cain (born December 13, 1945) is an American businessman, politician, columnist, and radio host from Georgia. He is the former chairman and CEO of Godfather's Pizza and a former deputy chairman (1992–94) and chairman (1995–96) of the board of directors to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Before his business and economics career he worked as a mathematician in ballistics for the United States Navy. Cain's newspaper column is distributed by North Star Writers Group. He lives in the Atlanta suburbs, where he also serves as a minister at Antioch Baptist Church North.

In January 2011, Cain announced he had formed an exploratory committee for a potential presidential campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, and on May 21, 2011, Cain officially announced his candidacy.

Background

Cain was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on December 13, 1945, the son of Lenora (née Davis) and Luther Cain, Jr. His mother was a cleaner and his father was a chauffeur. He was raised in Georgia. He graduated from Morehouse College in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and received a Master of Science degree in computer science from Purdue University in 1971, while he was also working full-time in ballistics for the U.S. Department of the Navy. Cain has authored four books: ''Leadership is Common Sense'' (1997), ''Speak as a Leader'' (1999), ''CEO of SELF'' (October 2001), and ''They Think You're Stupid'' (May 2005). He also authored an article titled "The Intangibles of Implementation" in the technical journal ''Interfaces'' (Vol. 9, No. 5, 1979, pp. 144-147), published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Business career

After completing his master's degree from Purdue, Cain left the Department of the Navy and began working for The Coca-Cola Company as a business analyst. In 1977, he joined Pillsbury where he rose to the position of Vice President by the early 1980s. He left his executive post to work for Burger King – a Pillsbury subsidiary at the time – managing 400 stores in the Philadelphia area. Under Cain's leadership, his region went from the least profitable for Burger King to the most profitable in three years. This prompted Pillsbury to appoint him President and CEO of Godfather's Pizza, another of their then-subsidiaries. Within 14 months, Cain had returned Godfather's to profitability. In 1988, Cain and a group of investors bought Godfather's from Pillsbury. Cain continued as CEO until 1996, when he resigned to become CEO of the National Restaurant Association – a trade group and lobby organization for the restaurant industry – where he had previously been chairman concurrently with his role at Godfather's.

Cain became a member of the board of directors to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in 1992 and served as its chairman from January 1995 to August 1996, when he resigned to become active in national politics. Cain was a 1996 recipient of the Horatio Alger Award.

Cain was on the board of directors of Aquila, Inc. from 1992 to 2008, and also served as a board member for Nabisco, Whirlpool, Reader's Digest, and AGCO, Inc.

Media work

Cain serves as a commentator for Fox Business; he is also a syndicated columnist distributed by the North Star Writers Group. Until February 2011, Cain hosted ''The Herman Cain Show'' on Atlanta talk radio station News Talk 750 WSB, a Cox Radio affiliate. In 2009, Cain founded "Hermanator's Intelligent Thinkers Movement" (HITM), aimed at organizing 100,000 activists in every congressional district in the United States in support of a strong national defense, the FairTax, tax cuts, energy independence, capping government spending, and restructuring Social Security.

Political activities

Role in the defeat of the Clinton health care plan

Cain publicly opposed the 1993/1994 health care plan of President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. As president-elect of the National Restaurant Association, he challenged Bill Clinton on the costs of the employer mandate contained within the bill and criticizing its effect on small businesses. Cain has been described as one of the primary "saboteurs" of the plan: :The Clintons would later blame "Harry and Louise," the fictional couple in the ads aired by the insurance industry, for undermining health reform. But the real saboteurs are named Herman and John. Herman Cain is the president of Godfather's Pizza and president-elect of the National Restaurant Association. An articulate black entrepreneur, Cain transformed the debate when he challenged Clinton at a town meeting in Kansas City, Mo., last April. Cain asked the president what he was supposed to say to the workers he would have to lay off because of the cost of the "employer mandate." Clinton responded that there would be plenty of subsidies for small businessmen, but Cain persisted. "Quite honestly, your calculation is inaccurate," he told the president. "In the competitive marketplace it simply doesn't work that way." Joshua Green of ''The Atlantic'' has called Cain's exchange with Clinton his "auspicious debut on the national political stage."

1996 Senior Advisor of Dole/Kemp Campaign

Cain was a senior economic advisor to the Dole/Kemp presidential campaign in 1996.

2000 presidential campaign

Cain briefly ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000; he says it was more about making political statements than winning the nomination. "George W. Bush was the chosen one, he had the campaign DNA that followers look for." However, Cain went on to state, "I believe that I had a better message and I believe that I was the better messenger."

2004 U.S. Senate candidacy

In 2004, Cain ran for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, pursuing the seat that came open with the retirement of Democrat Zell Miller. Cain sought the Republican nomination, facing congressmen Johnny Isakson and Mac Collins in the primary. Cain and Collins both hoped to deny Isakson a majority on primary day in order to force him into a runoff. Collins tried to paint Cain as a moderate, citing Cain's support for affirmative action programs, while Cain argued that he was a conservative, noting that he opposed the legality of abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Cain finished second in the primary with 26.2% of the vote, ahead of Collins, who won 20.6%, but because Isakson won 53.2% of the vote, Isakson was able to avoid a runoff.

2012 presidential candidacy

In 2010, "Cain addressed more than 40 Tea Party rallies, hit all the early presidential states, and became a YouTube sensation." In April, he teased the audience at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference about his being a possible 2012 presidential candidate by saying that there may be a "dark horse candidate." On September 24, 2010, Cain announced that he was considering a run for president in 2012 on the Republican Party ticket. "In December, he was the surprise choice for 2012 GOP nominee in a reader poll on the conservative Web site RedState.com, narrowly edging out [Sarah] Palin."

Cain announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee on January 12, 2011 on the Fox News Channel program ''Your World with Neil Cavuto''.

Cain supports a non-federally subsidized efficient economic stimulus, saying: "We could grow this economy faster if we had bolder, more direct stimulus policies," criticizing President Barack Obama's stimulus plan as simply a "spending bill" instead of meaningful stimulus through permanent tax cuts.

In February 2011, Cain addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Ed Morrisey of the conservative website Hot Air said he "stole the show" and that some attendees were moved to tears by the speech. In contrast, liberal website AlterNet accused Cain of pandering to white conservatives and referred to him and other black conservatives as "garbage pail kids". Cain called the news website's attacks racist and condemned its "shameful behavior".

A number of comments made by Cain regarding his attitudes towards Muslim people have caused controversy. He has stated that he was "uncomfortable" when he found that the surgeon operating on his liver and colon cancer was Muslim, later explaining "based upon the little knowledge that I have of the Muslim religion, you know, they have an objective to convert all infidels or kill them". Following a number of such comments, he was asked in March 2011 if he would feel comfortable appointing a Muslim to his administration or as a Judge. Cain said "No, I will not ... There's this creeping attempt, there's this attempt, to gradually ease Shariah Law, and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government" and he went on to cite court cases in Oklahoma and New Jersey as evidence. He was criticized for this remark by conservatives at Grover Norquist's weekly Wednesday Gatherings, one of whom called the remark "frightening." Cain's statement was also criticized as "bigotry" and "muslim bashing" from CAIR, whose spokesperson stated "It would be laughable if it weren't having such a negative impact on the lives of Muslim Americans". Cain opposed the building of an Islamic Center for a Muslim community at a site in Tennessee, claiming that it was "an infringement and an abuse of our freedom of religion" and "just another way to try to gradually sneak Shariah law into our laws". Defending himself against the suggestion that this would be bigotry or discrimination during an interview with Chris Wallace, he defended his position, saying "I'm willing to take a harder look at people who might be terrorists, that's what I'm saying".

In an interview with Bloomberg view, Cain argued that he is a 'black American' rather than an 'African American' on account of being able to trace his ancestors within the US, describing Barack Obama as "more of an international...look, he was raised in Kenya, his mother was white from Kansas and her family had an influence on him, it’s true, but his dad was Kenyan". Interviewer Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out that Obama had spent 4 years of his childhood abroad, and that it was in Indonesia – not Kenya, at which point Cain revised his claim.

On May 5, 2011 Fox News presented a presidential campaign debate. Cain was one of five potential candidates who participated. (The others were Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul, Gary Johnson and Rick Santorum as the higher-profile candidates declined Fox's invitation.) Cain was declared the winner by pollster Frank Luntz after a show of hands among 29 debate witnesses who were chosen by Fox to act as a post-performance focus group.

On June 3, 2011, an Insider-Advantage poll showed Cain leading the field of Republican primary candidates among Georgia Republicans. A July 2011 Zogby poll showed Cain in second place nationally, with 18% of the vote, behind Michele Bachmann and ahead of Romney.

Political positions

Personal life

Religious involvement

Cain is an associate minister at Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta, which he joined at the age of 10. The church is part of the National Baptist Convention, USA.

Cancer

In 2006, Cain was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer in both his colon and his liver. Cain underwent surgery and chemotherapy following the diagnosis, and has since reported that he is cancer-free.

Race

Cain has shared first-hand accounts of racial discrimination. In a YouTube video uploaded by his campaign, he describes the experience of sitting behind the white/black demarcation on buses. He also talks about the experience of taking turns with his brother, standing watch as each took a drink from the "white" side of a segregated water fountain in a department store.

Honorary degrees

Cain is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from Creighton, Johnson & Wales, Morehouse College, Nebraska, New York City Technical College, Purdue, Suffolk University, and Tougaloo College.

References

External links

Herman Cain, President 2012 official campaign website

Column archives at the North Star Writers Group

Profile at ''Forbes''

Watch Herman Cain Battle Bill Clinton on Health Care, Joshua Green, ''The Atlantic'', January 2011, with Profile

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Coordinates	40°26′30″N80°00′00″N
Name	Eric Schmidt
Birth date	April 27, 1955
Birth place	Washington, D.C., United States
Residence	Atherton, California, U.S.
Occupation	Software engineer, businessman
Alma mater	Princeton University (BS)University of California, Berkeley (MS, PhD)
Salary	$557,466 compensation in 2006
Networth	US$ 6.3 billion (2011)
Title	Executive Chairman of Google
Website	}}

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, businessman and the current executive chairman of Google. From 2001 to 2011, he served as the chief executive of Google.

Additionally, Schmidt was a former member on the board of directors for Apple Inc. and sat on the boards of trustees for both Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University.

Along with Mike Lesk, Schmidt co-authored the lex analysis software program for the Unix computer operating system.

Biography

Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Arlington, Virginia, United States. After graduating from Yorktown High School, Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1976. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979 for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments, and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems. He was joint author of ''lex'' (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business as a part time professor.

Schmidt and his wife Wendy lived in Atherton, California in 1999. In 2011, he was reported to be dating Lisa Shields, a communications executive for the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based foreign policy think tank..

He was on the list of ARTnews 200 top art collectors in 2008.

He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the Swiss 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

The Eric Schmidt Family Foundation

The Eric Schmidt Family Foundation addresses issues of sustainability and the responsible use of natural resources. Wendy and Eric Schmidt, working with Heart Howerton, a San Francisco architectural firm that specializes in large-scale land use, have inaugurated several projects on the island of Nantucket that seek to sustain the unique character of the island, and to minimize the impact of seasonal visitation on the island's core community. Wendy Schmidt offered the prize purse of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, a challenge award for efficient capturing of crude oil from seawater motivated by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Career

Early career

Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies, including Bell Labs, Zilog and Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

From Sun to Google

Schmidt joined Sun Microsystems in 1983 as its first software manager. He rose to become director of software engineering, vice president and general manager of the software products division, vice president of the general systems group, and president of Sun Technology Enterprises.

During his time at Sun he was the butt of two notable April Fool's Day pranks. In the first his office was taken apart and rebuilt on a platform in the middle of a pond complete with working phone. The next year a working Volkswagen Bug was taken apart and re-assembled in his office.

In April 1997, he became CEO and chairman of the board of Novell. Schmidt left Novell after the acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Schmidt. Impressed by him, they recruited Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the guidance of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.

Google

Schmidt joined Google's board of directors as chairman in March 2001 and became the company's CEO in August 2001. At Google, Schmidt shared responsibility for Google's daily operations with founders Page and Brin. As indicated by page 29 of Google's 2004 S-1 Filing Schmidt, Page, and Brin ran Google as a triumvirate. Schmidt had legal responsibilities typically assigned to the CEO of a public company and focused on management of the vice presidents and the sales organization.

According to Google's website, Schmidt also focuses on "building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum."

In 2007, ''PC World'' ranked Schmidt as the first on the list of the 50 most important people on the web, along with Google co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

In 2009, Schmidt was considered one of the "TopGun CEOs" by Brendan Wood International, an advisory agency.

On January 20, 2011, Google announced that Schmidt would step down as CEO of Google, but continue as the executive chairman of the company, and act as an adviser to co-founders Page and Brin. Page replaced Schmidt as CEO on April 4, 2011.

The 2011 book ''In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives'' by Steven Levy claims that in 2001, Schmidt requested that a political donation he made be removed from Google search results. The request was not fulfilled. Schmidt has denied this ever occurred.

Apple

Schmidt was elected to Apple's board of directors on August 28, 2006. On August 3, 2009, it was announced that Schmidt would resign from the board of directors at Apple due to conflicts of interest amid the growing competition between Google and Apple.

President Barack Obama

Schmidt "was a campaign advisor and major donor to Barack Obama, and when he announced he was leaving that perch, he planned to remain 'at the forefront of Google’s government relations team.' Obama has even considered him for Commerce Secretary." Schmidt was an informal advisor to the Obama presidential campaign and began campaigning the week of October 19, 2008, on behalf of the candidate. He had been mentioned as a possible candidate for the chief technology officer position which Obama created in his administration. After Obama won, Schmidt was a member of President Obama's transition advisory board. He proposed that the easiest way to solve all of the problems of the United States at once, at least in the domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and, over time, attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. He has since become a new member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology PCAST.

New America Foundation

The New America Foundation is a non-profit public policy institute and think tank, founded in 1999. Schmidt is the current chairman of the board of directors. He succeeded founding chairman James Fallows in 2008.

Innovation Endeavors

Founded in 2010 by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and Dror Berman, Innovation Endeavors is an early stage venture fund focused on advancing the world by providing high-impact entrepreneurs with the capital, coaching and network to build game-changing ventures. Innovation Endeavors has invested in more than 30 companies around the world in various industries. The firm is based in Palo Alto, USA.

Compensation

Upon being hired at Google, Eric Schmidt was paid a salary of $250,000, and an annual performance bonus. He was granted 14,331,703 shares of class B common stock at 30 cents per share, and 426,892 shares of Series C preferred stock at purchase price of $2.34.

Schmidt and the Google founders agreed to a base salary of $1 in 2004 (which continued through 2010), with other compensation of $557,465 in 2006, $508,763 in 2008 and $243,661 in 2009. He did not receive any additional stock, or options in 2009 or 2010. Most of his compensation was for "personal security" and charters of private aircraft. Schmidt is one of the few people who became billionaires (in United States dollars) based on stock options received as an employee in a corporation of which he was neither the founder nor a relative of the founder. In its 2011 'World's Billionaires' list, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 136th richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $7 billion. Google gave him $100 million in 2011 as a parting gift.

Views

During an interview which aired on December 3, 2009, on the CNBC documentary "Inside the Mind of Google", Schmidt was asked, "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?" His reply was: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that, that information could be made available to the authorities." At the Techonomy conference on August 4, 2010, Schmidt expressed that technology is good, but he said that the only way to manage the challenges is "much greater transparency and no anonymity." Schmidt also stated that in an era of asymmetric threats, "true anonymity is too dangerous."

In August 2010, Schmidt clarified his company's views on network neutrality: "I want to be clear what we mean by Net neutrality: What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don't discriminate against one person's video in favor of another. But it's okay to discriminate across different types, so you could prioritize voice over video, and there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue."

See also

List of billionaires

70/20/10 Model — business model advocated by Schmidt

RechargeIT

References

External links

;Speeches

Eric Schmidt and Larry Page speaking at Stanford (May 1, 2002)

Eric Schmidt talks about innovation on Executive Talks, November 2006

Schmidt-ceo-of-google.html Eric Schmidt interview by iinnovate, March 2007

YouTube: Eric Schmidt at the Seoul Digital Forum. (2007.06.05)

Eric Schmidt speaks as part of NASA 50 years Lecture Series, January 17, 2008

Mobile World Congress 2010 Keynote: Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google(Feb 2010)

iTunes: Google making of a modern company.

;Articles

CNET: Google balances privacy, reach (July 14, 2005), which uses Eric Schmidt as an example of the personal information held by Google.

Princeton University Board of Trustees

Category:1955 births Category:American art collectors Category:American billionaires Category:American chief executives Category:American computer businesspeople Category:American electrical engineers Category:Apple Inc. employees Category:Businesspeople from Washington, D.C. Category:Chairmen of corporations Category:Directors of Google Category:Google employees Category:Living people Category:People from Washington, D.C. Category:Princeton University alumni Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni

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Coordinates	40°26′30″N80°00′00″N
Name	Mitt Romney
Alt	Outdoor portrait of Mitt Romney taken in 2011
Order	70th
Office	Governor of Massachusetts
Lieutenant	Kerry Healey
Term start	January 2, 2003
Term end	January 4, 2007
Predecessor	Jane Swift (Acting)
Successor	Deval Patrick
Birth date	March 12, 1947
Birth place	Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Party	Republican
Residence	Belmont, MassachusettsWolfeboro, New HampshireLa Jolla, San Diego, California
Spouse
Children	Taggart (Tagg) (b. 1970) Matthew (b. 1971) Joshua (b. 1975) Benjamin (b. 1978) Craig (b. 1981)
Alma mater
Religion	The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon)
Blank1	Positions
Data1	Co-founder, Bain Capital (1984–1999)CEO, Bain & Company (1991–1992)CEO, 2002 Winter Olympics Organizing Committee (1999–2002)
Signature	Mitt Romney Signature.svg
Signature alt	Signature "Mitt Romney", first name more legible than last name
Website	MittRomney.com }}

Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American businessman and politician. He was the 70th Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007 and is a candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination.

The son of George W. Romney (the former Governor of Michigan) and Lenore Romney, Mitt Romney was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and during his college years served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in France. He married Ann Davies in 1969 and they have five children. He received his undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University, and then earned a joint JD and MBA from Harvard University. Romney entered the management consulting business, which led to a position at Bain & Company. Eventually serving as CEO, Romney brought the company out of crisis. He was co-founder and head of the spin-off company Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm that became highly profitable and one of the largest such firms in the nation. His wealth helped fund most of his future political campaigns. Active in his church, he served as ward bishop and later stake president in his area. He ran as the Republican candidate in the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, losing to long-time incumbent Ted Kennedy. Romney organized and steered the 2002 Winter Olympics as head of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, and helped turn the troubled games into a financial success.

Romney was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 2002 but did not seek re-election in 2006. He presided over a series of spending cuts and increases in fees that eliminated an up to $1.5 billion deficit. He also signed into law the Massachusetts health care reform legislation, which provided near-universal health insurance access via subsidies and state-level mandates and was the first of its kind in the nation. During the course of his political career, his positions or rhetorical emphasis have shifted more towards American conservatism in several areas.

Romney ran for the Republican nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, winning several primaries and caucuses but losing the nomination to John McCain. In the following years, he gave speeches and raised campaign funds on behalf of fellow Republicans. In June 2011, Romney announced that he would seek the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. The results of the caucuses and primaries have placed him as the clear leader and the Republican National Committee has declared him the presumptive nominee.

Early life and education

Heritage and youth

Romney was born in Detroit, Michigan. He was the youngest child of George W. Romney, who by 1948 had become an automobile executive, and Lenore Romney (née LaFount). His mother was a native of Logan, Utah, and his father had been born in a Mormon colony in Chihuahua, Mexico, to American parents. Romney is of primarily English descent, and also has more distant Scottish and German ancestry. Romney is a fifth-generation member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A great-great-grandfather, Miles Archibald Romney, converted to the faith in its first decade, and another great-great-grandfather, Parley P. Pratt, was an early leader in the church during the same time.

The three siblings before him were Margo Lynn, Jane LaFount, and G. Scott, followed by Mitt after a gap of six years. Romney was named after hotel magnate J. Willard Marriott, his father's best friend, and his father's cousin Milton "Mitt" Romney, 1925–1929 quarterback for the Chicago Bears.|group="nb"}} When he was five, the family moved from Detroit to the affluent suburb of Bloomfield Hills. His father became CEO of American Motors and turned the company around from the brink of bankruptcy; by the time he was twelve, his father had become a nationally known figure in print and on television. Romney idolized his father, read automotive trade magazines, kept abreast of automotive developments, and aspired to be an executive in the industry. His father also presided over the Detroit Stake of the LDS Church.

Romney went to public elementary schools and then from seventh grade on, attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, a private boys preparatory school of the classic mold where he was the lone Mormon and where many students came from even more privileged backgrounds. He was not particularly athletic and at first did not excel at academics. While a sophomore, he participated in the campaign in which his father was elected Governor of Michigan. George Romney was re-elected twice; Mitt worked for him as an intern in the governor's office, and was present at the 1964 Republican National Convention when his moderate father battled conservative party nominee Barry Goldwater over issues of civil rights and ideological extremism. Romney had a steady set of chores and worked summer jobs, including being a security guard at a Chrysler plant.

Initially a manager for the ice hockey team and a member of the pep squad and various school clubs, during his final year at Cranbook, Romney joined the cross country running team and improved academically, but was still not a star pupil. His social skills were good, however, and he won an award for those "whose contributions to school life are often not fully recognized through already existing channels". Romney was an energetic child who enjoyed pranks.|group="nb"}}

In March of his senior year, he began dating Ann Davies, two years behind him, whom he had once known in elementary school; she attended the private Kingswood School, the sister school to Cranbrook. The two informally agreed to marriage around the time of his June 1965 graduation.

University, France mission, marriage and children: 1965–1975

Romney attended Stanford University for a year, where he worked as a night security guard to fund secret trips home to see Ann. Although the campus was becoming radicalized with the beginnings of 1960s social and political movements, Romney kept a well-groomed appearance and enjoyed traditional campus events. In May 1966, he was part of a counter-protest against a group staging a sit-in in the university administration building in opposition to draft status tests.

In July 1966, Romney left for 30 months in France as a Mormon missionary. Missionary work was a traditional rite of passage that his father and many other relatives had volunteered for. He arrived in Le Havre with ideas about how to change and promote the French Mission, while facing physical and economic deprivation in their cramped quarters. Rules against drinking, smoking, and dating were strictly enforced. Like most individual Mormon missionaries, he did not gain many converts, with the nominally Catholic but secular, wine-loving French people proving especially resistant to a religion that prohibits alcohol. He became demoralized, and later recalled it as the only time when "most of what I was trying to do was rejected." In Nantes, Romney was bruised defending two female missionaries against a horde of local rugby players. He continued to work hard; having grown up in Michigan rather than the more insular Utah world, Romney was better able to interact with the French. He was promoted to zone leader in Bordeaux in early 1968, then in the spring of that year became assistant to the mission president in Paris, the highest position for a missionary. In the Mission Home in Paris he enjoyed palace-like accommodations. Romney's support for the U.S. role in the Vietnam War was only reinforced when the French greeted him with hostility over the matter and he debated them in return. He also witnessed the May 1968 general strike and student uprisings.

In June 1968, an automobile Romney was driving in southern France was hit by another vehicle, seriously injuring him and killing one of his passengers, the wife of the mission president. As they drove through the village of Bernos-Beaulac, a Mercedes that was passing a truck missed a curve and suddenly swerved into the opposite lane and hit the Citroën DS Romney was driving in a head-on collision. Trapped between the steering wheel and door, the unconscious and seriously injured Romney had to be pried from the car; a French police officer mistakenly wrote ''Il est mort'' in his passport. The wife of the mission president was killed and other passengers were seriously injured as well. George Romney relied on his friend Sargent Shriver, the U.S. Ambassador to France, to go to the local hospital and discover that his son had survived. Romney, who was not at fault in the accident, had suffered broken ribs, a fractured arm, a concussion, and facial injuries, but recovered quickly without needing surgery. The French police say that they have no records of the incident because such records are routinely destroyed after 10 years.|name="nb-acc"|group="nb"}} Romney, who was not at fault in the accident, became co-acting president of a mission demoralized and disorganized by the May civil disturbances and by the car accident. Romney rallied and motivated the others and they met an ambitious goal of 200 baptisms for the year, the most for the mission in a decade. By the end of his stint in December 1968, Romney was overseeing the work of 175 fellow members. Romney developed a lifelong affection for France and its people, and speaks French. The experience in the country also changed him. It instilled in him a belief that life is fragile and that he needed seriousness of purpose. He gained organizational experience and a record of accomplishments that he had theretofore lacked. It also represented a crucible, after having been only a half-hearted Mormon growing up: "On a mission, your faith in Jesus Christ either evaporates or it becomes much deeper. For me it became much deeper."

While he was away, Ann Davies had converted to the LDS Church, guided by George Romney, and had begun attending Brigham Young University (BYU). Romney was nervous that she had been wooed by others while he was away, and she had indeed started dating popular campus figure Kim S. Cameron and had sent Romney in France a "Dear John letter", greatly upsetting him; he wrote to her to in an attempt to win her back. At their first meeting following Romney's return they reconnected, and decided to get married in two weeks but agreed to wait three months to appease their parents. At Ann's request, Romney began attending Brigham Young too, in February 1969. He later recounted that he had planned to attend BYU to convince Ann to marry him, then the couple planned to transfer together back to Stanford, but in the end, they enjoyed BYU and decided to stay.|name="nb-byu"|group="nb"}} The couple were married on March 21, 1969, in a civil ceremony at Ann's family's home in Bloomfield Hills that was presided over by a church elder. The following day the couple flew to Utah for a wedding ceremony at the Salt Lake Temple.

Romney had missed much of the tumultuous American anti-Vietnam War movement while away, and was surprised to learn that his father had turned against the war during his unsuccessful 1968 presidential campaign. Regarding the military draft, Romney had initially received a student deferment, then like most other Mormon missionaries a ministerial deferment while in France, then another student deferment. When those ran out, his high number in the December 1969 draft lottery (300) ensured he would not be selected.

At culturally conservative BYU, Romney continued to be separated from much of the upheaval of the era, and did not join in those protests that did occur against the war or the LDS Church's policy at the time of denying full membership to blacks. He became president of, and an innovative fundraiser for, the all-male Cougar Club and showed a new-found discipline in his studies. In his senior year he took leave to work as driver and advance man for his mother Lenore Romney's eventually unsuccessful 1970 campaign for U.S. Senator from Michigan. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English with highest honors in 1971, and gave commencement addresses to both his own College of Humanities and to the whole university.|group="nb"}}

The Romneys' first son, Tagg, was born in 1970 while the Romneys were undergraduates at Brigham Young and living in a basement apartment. Ann subsequently gave birth to Matt (1971), Josh (1975), Ben (1978), and Craig (1981). Ann Romney's work as a homemaker would enable her husband to pursue his career.

Romney still wanted to pursue a business path, but his father, by now serving in President Richard Nixon's cabinet as U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, advised that a law degree would be valuable. Thus Romney became one of only fifteen students to enroll at the recently created joint Juris Doctor/Master of Business Administration four-year program coordinated between Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. Fellow students considered Romney guilelessly optimistic, noting his solid work ethic along with a buttoned-down demeanor and appearance. He readily adapted to the business school's pragmatic, data-driven case study method of teaching, participated in class well, and led a study group whom he pushed to get all A's. He had a different social experience from most of his classmates, since he lived in a Belmont, Massachusetts, house with Ann and two children; he was non-ideological and did not involve himself in the political or social issues of the day. He graduated in 1975 ''cum laude'' from the law school, in the top third of that class, and was named a Baker Scholar for graduating in the top five percent of his business school class.

Business career

Management consulting

Romney was heavily recruited and chose to remain in Massachusetts to work for Boston Consulting Group (BCG), thinking that working as a management consultant to a variety of companies would prepare him for a future job as a chief executive. Romney was part of a 1970s wave of top graduates who chose to go into consulting rather than join a major company directly. Romney's legal and business education proved useful in his job, and he became a rising star while applying BCG principles such as the growth-share matrix.

In 1977, he was hired away by Bain & Company, a management consulting firm in Boston that had been formed a few years earlier by Bill Bain and other former BCG employees. Bain would later say of the thirty-year-old Romney, "He had the appearance of confidence of a guy who was maybe ten years older." With Bain & Company, Romney learned the "Bain way", which consisted of immersing the firm in each client's business, and not simply to issue recommendations, but to stay with the company until they were changed for the better. With a record of helping clients such as the Monsanto Company, Outboard Marine Corporation, Burlington Industries, and Corning Incorporated, Romney became a vice president of the firm in 1978 and within a few years one of its best consultants and one sought after by clients over more senior partners. Romney became a believer in Bain's methods; he later said, "The idea that consultancies should not measure themselves by the thickness of their reports, or even the elegance of their writing, but rather by whether or not the report was effectively implemented was an inflection point in the history of consulting."

Private equity

Romney was restless for a company of his own to run, and in 1983, Bill Bain offered him the chance to head a new venture that would buy into companies, have them benefit from Bain techniques, and then reap higher rewards than just consulting fees. Romney initially refrained from accepting the offer, and Bain re-arranged the terms in a complicated partnership structure so that there was no financial or professional risk to Romney. Thus, in 1984, Romney left Bain & Company to co-found the spin-off private equity investment firm, Bain Capital. In the face of skepticism from potential investors, Bain and Romney spent a year raising the $37 million in funds needed to start the new operation, which had fewer than ten employees. As general partner of the new firm, Romney spent little money on costs such as office appearance, and saw weak spots in so many potential deals that by 1986, few had been done. At first, Bain Capital focused on venture capital opportunities. Their first big success came with a 1986 investment to help start Staples Inc., after founder Thomas G. Stemberg convinced Romney of the market size for office supplies and Romney convinced others; Bain Capital eventually reaped a nearly sevenfold return on its investment, and Romney sat on the Staples board of directors for over a decade.

Romney soon switched Bain Capital's focus from startups to the relatively new business of leveraged buyouts: buying existing firms with money mostly borrowed against their assets, partnering with existing management to apply the "Bain way" to their operations (rather than the hostile takeovers practiced in other leverage buyout scenarios), and then selling them off in a few years. Existing CEOs were offered large equity stakes in the process, as part of Bain Capital's belief in the emerging agency theory notion that CEOs should be bound to maximizing shareholder value rather than other goals. Bain Capital lost most of its money in many of its early leveraged buyouts, but then started finding deals that made large returns. The firm invested in or acquired Accuride, Brookstone, Domino's Pizza, Sealy Corporation, Sports Authority, and Artisan Entertainment, as well as lesser-known companies in the industrial and medical sectors. During the 14 years Romney headed the company, Bain Capital's average annual internal rate of return on realized investments was 113 percent. Much of this profit was earned from a relatively small number of deals, with Bain Capital's overall success–to–failure ratio being about even.

Less an entrepreneur than an executive running an investment operation, Romney was good at presenting and selling the deals the company made. The firm initially gave a cut of its profits to Bain & Company, but Romney persuaded Bain to give that up. Within Bain Capital, Romney spread profits from deals widely within the firm to keep people motivated, often keeping less than ten percent for himself. Viewed as a fair manager, he received considerable loyalty from the firm's members. Romney's wary instincts were still in force at times, and he was generally data-driven and averse to risk. He wanted to drop a Bain Capital hedge fund that initially lost money, but other partners prevailed and it eventually gained billions. He also personally opted out of the Artisan Entertainment deal, not wanting to profit from a studio that produced R-rated films. Romney was on the board of directors of Damon Corporation, a medical testing company later found guilty of defrauding the government; Bain Capital tripled its investment before selling off the company, and the fraud was discovered by the new owners (Romney was never implicated). In some cases Romney had little involvement with a company once acquired.

Bain Capital's leveraged buyouts sometimes led to layoffs, either soon after acquisition or later after the firm had left. How jobs added compared to those lost due to these investments and buyouts is unknown, due to a lack of records and Bain Capital's penchant for privacy on behalf of itself and its investors. In any case, maximizing the value of acquired companies and the return to Bain's investors, not job creation, was the firm's fundamental goal, as it was for most private equity operations. Bain Capital's acquisition of Ampad exemplified a deal where it profited handsomely from early payments and management fees, even though the subject company itself ended up going into bankruptcy. Dade Behring was another case where Bain Capital received an eightfold return on its investment, but the company itself was saddled with debt and laid off over a thousand employees before Bain Capital exited (the company subsequently went into bankruptcy, with more layoffs, before recovering and prospering). Bain was among the private equity firms that took the most fees in such cases.

In 1990, Romney was asked to return to Bain & Company, which was facing financial collapse. He was announced as its new CEO in January 1991 (but drew only a symbolic salary of one dollar). Romney managed an effort to restructure the firm's employee stock-ownership plan, real-estate deals and bank loans, while rallying the firm's thousand employees, imposing a new governing structure that included Bain and the other founding partners giving up control, and increasing fiscal transparency. Within about a year, he had led Bain & Company through a turnaround and returned the firm to profitability without further layoffs or partner defections. He turned Bain & Company over to new leadership and returned to Bain Capital in December 1992.

Romney left Bain Capital in February 1999 to serve as the President and CEO of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organizing Committee. By that time, Bain Capital was on its way to being one of the top private equity firms in the nation, having increased its number of partners from 5 to 18, having 115 employees overall, and having $4 billion under its management.

Wealth

Bain Capital's approach of applying consulting expertise to the companies it invested in became widely copied within the private equity industry. Economist Steven Kaplan would later say, "[Romney] came up with a model that was very successful and very innovative and that now everybody uses."

At the time of his departure, Romney negotiated an agreement with Bain Capital that allowed him to receive a passive profit share as a retired partner in some Bain Capital entities, including buyout and investment funds. Because the private equity business continued to thrive, this deal brought him millions of dollars in income each year.

As a result of his business career, by 2007, Romney and his wife had a net worth of between $190 and $250 million, most of it held in blind trusts. An additional blind trust existed in the name of the Romneys' children and grandchildren that was valued at between $70 and $100 million as of 2007. The couple's net worth remained in the same range as of 2011, and was still held in blind trusts. By 2010 and 2011, Romney and his wife were receiving about $21 million a year from investment income, of which about $3 million went to federal income taxes (based upon the beneficial rate accorded investment income by the U.S. tax code) and about $3.5 million to charity, of which about $2 million was to the LDS Church. Romney has always tithed to the church, including stock from Bain Capital holdings. In 2010, the Romney family's Tyler Charitable Foundation gave out about $650,000, with some of it going to organizations that fight specific diseases.

Local church leadership

During his years in business, Romney also served in the local lay clergy. Around 1977 he became a counselor to an area leader, an unusual post for someone of his age. He then served as ward bishop for Belmont, Massachusetts from 1981 to 1986, acting as the ecclesiastical and administrative head of his congregation. As such, he formulated Sunday services and classes, using the Bible and the Book of Mormon to guide the congregation, and also did home teaching. He forged bonds with other religious institutions in the area when the Belmont meetinghouse was hit by a fire of suspicious origins in 1984; the congregation rotated its meetings at other churches while theirs was rebuilt.

From 1986 to 1994, Romney presided over the Boston Stake, which included more than a dozen congregations in eastern Massachusetts with a total of about 4,000 church members. He organized a team to handle financial and management issues, sought to counter anti-Mormon sentiments, and tried to solve social problems among poor Southeast Asian converts. An unpaid position, Romney's local church leadership often took 30 or more hours a week of his time, and he became known for his unflagging energy in the role. Due to his responsibilities, he generally refrained from overnight business travel.

Romney took a hands-on role in general matters, helping in maintenance efforts in- and outside homes, visiting the sick, and counseling troubled or burdened church members. A number of local church members later credited Romney with turning their lives around or helping them through difficult times. Some others were rankled by his leadership style and desired a more consensus-based approach. Romney tried to balance the conservative dogma insisted upon by the church leadership in Utah with the desire by some Massachusetts members to have a more flexible application of doctrine. He agreed with some modest requests from the liberal women's group Exponent II for changes in the way the church dealt with women, but clashed with women who he felt were departing too much from doctrine. In particular, he counseled women not to have abortions except in the rare cases allowed by LDS doctrine, and also in accordance with doctrine encouraged prospective mothers to give up children for adoption when a successful marriage was not present. Romney later said that the years spent as pastor gave him direct exposure to people struggling in economically difficult circumstances different from his own affluent upbringing, and empathy for those going through problematic family situations.

1994 U.S. senatorial campaign

Romney had been thinking about entering politics for a while. He decided to take on longtime incumbent Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, who was more vulnerable than usual in 1994 – in part because of the unpopularity of the Democratic Congress as a whole, and also because this was Kennedy's first election since the William Kennedy Smith trial in Florida, in which Kennedy had taken some public relations hits regarding his character. Romney changed his affiliation from Independent to Republican in October 1993 and formally announced his candidacy in February 1994. He stepped down from his position at Bain Capital, and from his church leadership role, during the run.

Romney came from behind to win the Massachusetts Republican Party's nomination for U.S. Senate after buying substantial television time to get out his message and gaining overwhelming support in the state party convention. He then defeated businessman John Lakian in the September 1994 primary with over 80 percent of the vote.

In the general election, Kennedy faced the first serious re-election challenger of his career in the young, telegenic, and well-funded Romney. Romney ran as a fresh face, as a businessperson who stated he had created ten thousand jobs, and as a Washington outsider with a solid family image and moderate stands on social issues. When Kennedy tried to tie Romney's policies to those of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Romney responded, "Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I'm not trying to take us back to Reagan-Bush." Romney stated: "Ultimately, this is a campaign about change." After two decades out of public view, his father George re-emerged during the campaign as well.

Romney's campaign was effective in portraying Kennedy as soft on crime, but had trouble establishing its own positions in a consistent manner. By mid-September 1994, polls showed the race to be approximately even. Kennedy responded with a series of attack ads, which focused both on Romney's seemingly shifting political views on issues such as abortion and on the treatment of workers at the Ampad plant owned by Romney's Bain Capital. The latter was effective in blunting Romney's momentum. Kennedy and Romney held a widely watched late October debate without a clear winner, but by then Kennedy had pulled ahead in polls and stayed ahead afterward. Romney spent $3 million of his own money in the race. This was the second-most expensive race of the 1994 election cycle, after the Dianne Feinstein–Michael Huffington Senate race in California.|group="nb"}}

In the November general election, despite a disastrous showing for Democrats overall, Kennedy won the election with 58 percent of the vote to Romney's 41 percent, the smallest margin in Kennedy's eight re-election campaigns for the Senate.

2002 Winter Olympics

Romney returned to Bain Capital the day after the election but still smarted from the loss, subsequently telling his brother, "I never want to run for something again unless I can win." When his father died in 1995, Mitt donated his inheritance to BYU's George W. Romney Institute of Public Management and joined the board and was vice-chair of the Points of Light Foundation (which had incorporated his father's National Volunteer Center). His mother died in 1998. Romney felt restless as the decade neared a close; the goal of simply making more money was losing its appeal to him. He no longer had a church leadership position, although he still taught Sunday School. Fearing he would be a focal point for opposition, he had a limited, behind-the-scenes role in trying to ease tensions between the church and local residents during the long and controversial approval and construction process for a Mormon temple in Belmont (nevertheless, it still was sometimes referred to as "Mitt's Temple" by locals). Ann Romney was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998; Romney described watching her fail a series of neurological tests as the worst day of his life. After two years of severe difficulties with the disease, she found in Park City, Utah (where the couple had built a vacation home) a mixture of mainstream, alternative, and equestrian therapies that gave her a lifestyle mostly without limitations. When the offer came for Romney to take over the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics, to be held in Salt Lake City in Utah, she urged him to take it, and eager for a new challenge, he did. On February 11, 1999, Romney was hired as the president and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games of 2002.

Before Romney came on, the event was running $379 million short of its revenue benchmarks. Plans were being made to scale back the games to compensate for the fiscal crisis and there were fears the games might be moved away entirely. The Games had also been damaged by allegations of bribery involving top officials, including prior Salt Lake Olympic Committee president and CEO Frank Joklik. Joklik and committee vice president Dave Johnson were forced to resign. Romney's appointment faced some initial criticism from non-Mormons, and fears from Mormons, that it represented cronyism or gave the games too Mormon an image.

Romney revamped the organization's leadership and policies, reduced budgets, and boosted fund raising. He soothed worried corporate sponsors and recruited many new ones. He admitted past problems, listened to local critics, and rallied Utah's citizenry with a sense of optimism. Romney worked to ensure the safety of the Games following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by ignoring those who suggested the games be called off and coordinating a $300 million security budget. Overall he oversaw a $1.32 billion budget, 700 employees, and 26,000 volunteers. The federal government provided $382 million of that budget, much of it because Romney lobbied Congress to provide money for both security- and non-security-related items. An additional federal $1.1 billion was spent on indirect support in the form of highway and transit projects.

Romney became the public face of the Olympic effort, appearing in countless photographs and news stories and even on Olympics souvenir pins. Romney's omnipresence irked those who thought he was taking too much of the credit for the success, or had exaggerated the state of initial distress, or was primarily looking to improve his own image.

Despite the initial fiscal shortfall, the Games ended up clearing a profit of $100 million, not counting the $224.5 million in security costs contributed by outside sources. Romney broke the record for most private money raised by any individual for an Olympics games, summer or winter. His performance as Olympics head was rated positively by 87 percent of Utahns. Romney and his wife contributed $1 million to the Olympics, and he donated to charity the $1.4 million in salary and severance payments he received for his three years as president and CEO.

Romney was widely praised for his efforts with the 2002 Winter Olympics including by President George W. Bush, and it solidified his reputation as a turnaround artist. Harvard Business School taught a case study based around Romney's actions. Romney wrote a book about his experience titled ''Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games'', published in 2004. The role gave Romney experience in dealing with federal, state, and local entities, a public persona he had previously lacked, and the chance to re-launch his political aspirations. He was mentioned as a possible candidate for statewide office in both Massachusetts and Utah, and also as possibly joining the Bush administration.

Governor of Massachusetts

2002 gubernatorial campaign

In 2002, Republican Acting Governor Jane Swift's administration was plagued by political missteps and personal scandals. Many Republicans viewed her as a liability and considered her unable to win a general election. Prominent GOP activists campaigned to persuade Romney to run for governor. One poll taken at that time showed Republicans favoring Romney over Swift by more than 50 percentage points. In March 2002, Swift decided not to seek her party's nomination, and so Romney was unopposed in the Republican party primary.

Massachusetts Democratic Party officials contested Romney's eligibility to run for governor, citing residency issues involving Romney's time in Utah for the Olympics. In June 2002, the Massachusetts State Ballot Law Commission unanimously ruled that Romney was eligible to run.

Romney ran as a political outsider again, saying he was "not a partisan Republican" but rather a "moderate" with "progressive" views. Supporters of Romney hailed his business record, especially with the Olympics, as the record of someone who would be able to bring a new era of efficiency into Massachusetts politics. The campaign was the first to use microtargeting techniques, in which fine-grained groups of voters were reached with narrowly tailored messaging. Nevertheless, Romney had difficulty connecting with voters and fell behind his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts State Treasurer Shannon O'Brien, in polls for a while before rebounding. He contributed over $6 million to his own campaign during the election, a state record at the time. Romney was elected governor on November 5, 2002, with 50 percent of the vote to O'Brien's 45 percent.

Tenure, 2003–2007

Romney was sworn in as the 70th governor of Massachusetts on January 2, 2003. Both houses of the Massachusetts state legislature held large Democratic majorities. He picked his cabinet and advisors more on managerial abilities than partisan affiliation. Upon entering office in the middle of a fiscal year, Romney faced an immediate $650 million shortfall and a projected $3 billion deficit for the next year. Unexpected revenue of $1.0–1.3 billion from a previously enacted capital gains tax increase and $500 million in unanticipated federal grants decreased the deficit to $1.2–1.5 billion. Through a combination of spending cuts, increased fees, and removal of corporate tax loopholes, the state ran surpluses of around $600–700 million for the last two full fiscal years Romney was in office, although it began running deficits again after that. During fiscal 2007, Romney cut $384 million in spending that the legislature wanted; in January 2007, midway through the fiscal year, incoming Governor Deval Patrick restored that amount, and also declared that the state faced a "looming budget shortfall" of $1 billion for fiscal 2008. Patrick consequently proposed a budget for fiscal 2008 that included $515 million in spending cuts and $295 million in new corporate taxes. As it happened, the state ended fiscal 2007 with a $307.1 million deficit and fiscal 2008 with a $495.2 million deficit.|group="nb"}}

Romney supported raising various fees by more than $300 million, including those for driver's licenses, marriage licenses, and gun licenses. He increased a special gasoline retailer fee by two cents per gallon, generating about $60 million per year in additional revenue. (Opponents said the reliance on fees sometimes imposed a hardship on those who could least afford them.) Romney also closed tax loopholes that brought in another $181 million from businesses over the next two years and over $300 million for his term. Romney did so from a sense of rectitude and in the face of conservative and corporate critics that considered them tax increases.

The state legislature, with Romney's support, also cut spending by $1.6 billion, including $700 million in reductions in state aid to cities and towns. The cuts also included a $140 million reduction in state funding for higher education, which led state-run colleges and universities to increase tuition by 63 percent over four years. Romney sought additional cuts in his last year as governor by vetoing nearly 250 items in the state budget, but all were overridden by the heavily Democratic legislature.

The cuts in state spending put added pressure on local property taxes; the share of town and city revenues coming from property taxes rose from 49 to 53 percent. The combined state and local tax burden in Massachusetts increased during Romney's governorship but still was below the national average.

Romney was at the forefront of a movement to bring near-universal health insurance coverage to the state, after Staples founder Stemberg told him at the start of his term that doing so would be the best way he could help people and after the federal government, due to the rules of Medicaid funding, threatened to cut $385 million in those payments to Massachusetts if the state did not reduce the number of uninsured recipients of health care services. Despite not having campaigned on the idea of universal health insurance, Romney decided that because people without insurance still received expensive health care, the money spent by the state for such care could be better used to subsidize insurance for the poor.

After positing that any measure adopted not raise taxes and not resemble the previous decade's failed "Hillarycare" proposal, Romney formed a team of consultants from different political backgrounds that beginning in late 2004 came up with a set of innovative proposals more ambitious than an incremental one from the Massachusetts Senate and more acceptable to him than one from the Massachusetts House of Representatives that incorporated a new payroll tax. In particular, Romney pushed for incorporating an individual mandate at the state level. Past rival Ted Kennedy, who had made universal heath coverage his life's work and who, over time, had developed a warm relationship with Romney, gave Romney's plan a positive reception, which encouraged Democratic legislators to cooperate. The effort eventually gained the support of all major stakeholders within the state, and Romney helped break a logjam between rival Democratic leaders in the legislature.

On April 12, 2006, Romney signed the resulting Massachusetts health reform law, which requires nearly all Massachusetts residents to buy health insurance coverage or face escalating tax penalties such as the loss of their personal income tax exemption. The bill also establishes means-tested state subsidies for people who do not have adequate employer insurance and who make below an income threshold, by using funds previously designated to compensate for the health costs of the uninsured. He vetoed eight sections of the health care legislation, including a controversial $295-per-employee assessment on businesses that do not offer health insurance and provisions guaranteeing dental benefits to Medicaid recipients. The legislature overrode all eight vetoes, but the governor's office said the differences were not essential. The law was the first of its kind in the nation and became the signature achievement of Romney's term in office.|group="nb"}}

At the beginning of his governorship, Romney opposed same-sex marriage and civil unions, but advocated tolerance and supported some domestic partnership benefits. Faced with the dilemma of choosing between same-sex marriage or civil unions after the November 2003 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision legalizing same-sex marriages (''Goodridge v. Department of Public Health''), Romney reluctantly backed a state constitutional amendment in February 2004 that would have banned same-sex marriage but still allow civil unions, viewing it as the only feasible way to ban same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. In May 2004, Romney instructed town clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but citing a 1913 law that barred out-of-state residents from getting married in Massachusetts if their union would be illegal in their home state, no marriage licenses were to be issued to out-of-state same-sex couples not planning to move to Massachusetts. In June 2005, Romney abandoned his support for the compromise amendment, stating that the amendment confused voters who oppose both same-sex marriage and civil unions. Instead, Romney endorsed a petition effort led by the Coalition for Marriage & Family that would have banned same-sex marriage and made no provisions for civil unions. In 2004 and 2006, he urged the U.S. Senate to vote in favor of the Federal Marriage Amendment.

In 2005, Romney revealed a change of view regarding abortion, moving from an "unequivocal" pro-choice position expressed during his 2002 campaign to a pro-life one where he opposed ''Roe v. Wade''. He vetoed a bill on pro-life grounds that would expand access to emergency contraception in hospitals and pharmacies (the veto was overridden by the legislature).

Romney generally used the bully pulpit approach towards promoting his agenda, staging well-organized media events to appeal directly to the public rather than pushing his proposals in behind-doors sessions with the state legislature. Romney dealt with a crisis of confidence in Boston's Big Dig project – that followed a fatal ceiling collapse in 2006 – by wresting control of the project from the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and helping ensure it would eventually complete.

During 2004, Romney spent considerable effort trying to bolster the state Republican Party, but it failed to gain any seats in the state legislative elections that year. Given a prime-time appearance at the 2004 Republican National Convention, Romney was already being discussed as a potential 2008 presidential candidate. Midway through his term, Romney decided that he wanted to stage a full-time run for president, and on December 14, 2005, Romney announced that he would not seek re-election for a second term as governor. As chair of the Republican Governors Association, Romney traveled around the country, meeting prominent Republicans and building a national political network; he spent part or all of more than 200 days out of state during 2006, preparing for his run. Romney's frequent out-of-state travel contributed towards his approval rating declining in public polls towards the end of his term. The weak condition of the Republican state party was one of several factors that led to Democrat Deval Patrick's lopsided win over Republican Kerry Healey in the 2006 Massachusetts gubernatorial election.

Romney filed to register a presidential campaign committee with the Federal Election Commission on his penultimate day in office as governor. Romney's term ended January 4, 2007.

2008 presidential campaign

Romney formally announced his candidacy for the 2008 Republican nomination for president on February 13, 2007, at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In his speech, Romney frequently invoked his father and his own family and stressed experiences in the private, public, and voluntary sectors that had brought him to this point. He said, "Throughout my life, I have pursued innovation and transformation," and casting himself as a political outsider, said, "I do not believe Washington can be transformed from within by a lifelong politician."

The assets that Romney's campaign began with included his résumé of a highly-profitable career in the business world and his stewardship of the Olympics.|group="nb"}} Romney also had political experience as governor, together with a political pedigree courtesy of his father, and had a reputation for a strong work ethic and energy level. Ann Romney, who had become an outspoken advocate for those with multiple sclerosis, was in remission and would be an active participant in his campaign, helping to soften his political personality. Moreover, a number of commentators noted that with his square jaw and ample hair graying at the temples, the Romney – referred to as handsome in scores of media stories – physically matched one of the common images of what some believed a president should look like. Romney's liabilities included having run for senator and served as governor in one of the nation's most liberal states, having taken some positions there that were opposed by the party's conservative base, and subsequently shifting those positions. His religion was also viewed with suspicion and skepticism by some in the Evangelical portion of the party.

Romney assembled for his campaign a veteran group of Republican staffers, consultants, and pollsters. He was little-known nationally, though, and stayed around the 10 percent range in Republican preference polls for the first half of 2007. He proved the most effective fundraiser of any of the Republican candidates; his Olympics ties helped him with fundraising from Utahns and from sponsors and trustees of the games. He also partly financed his campaign with his own personal fortune. These resources, combined with the mid-year near-collapse of nominal front-runner John McCain's campaign, made Romney a threat to win the nomination and the focus of the other candidates' attacks. Romney's staff suffered from internal strife and the candidate himself was indecisive at times, constantly asking for more data before making a decision.

During all of his political campaigns, Romney has generally avoided speaking publicly about specific Mormon doctrines, referring to the U.S. Constitution prohibition of religious tests for public office. But persistent questions about the role of religion in Romney's life in this race, as well as Southern Baptist minister and former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee's rise in the polls based upon an explicitly Christian-themed campaign, led to the December 6, 2007, "Faith in America" speech. He said should neither be elected nor rejected based upon his religion, and echoed Senator John F. Kennedy's famous speech during his 1960 presidential campaign in saying, "I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law." Instead of discussing the specific tenets of his faith, he said that he would be informed by it and that, "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone." Academics would later study the role religion had played in the campaign. The authors concluded that, "For Romney ... religion ''is'' the central story." Another study, analyzing a survey conducted during January 2008 (when an African American, a woman, and a Mormon all had realistic chances of becoming the first president from that group), found that voters had internally accepted the notion of black equality, paving the way for Barack Obama's election; had partially established but not fully internalized the notion of gender equality, making Hillary Rodham Clinton's task somewhat more difficult; but had only selectively internalized the notion of religious equality, and in particular not extended it to Mormons, thus making Romney's run significantly more difficult. Those authors concluded that, "for a Mormon candidate, the road to the presidency remains very rough ... The bias against a Mormon candidate is substantial." |group="nb"}}

In the January 3, 2008, Iowa Republican caucuses, the first contest of the primary season, Romney received 25 percent of the vote and placed second to the vastly outspent Huckabee, who received 34 percent. Of the 60 percent of caucus-goers who were evangelical Christians, Huckabee was supported by about half of them while Romney by only a fifth. A couple of days later, Romney won the lightly contested Wyoming Republican caucuses.

At a Saint Anselm College debate, Huckabee and McCain pounded away at Romney's image as a flip flopper. Indeed, this label would stick to Romney through the campaign (but was one that Romney rejected as unfair and inaccurate, except for his acknowledged change of mind on abortion). Romney seemed to approach the campaign as a management consulting exercise, and showed a lack of personal warmth and political feel; journalist Evan Thomas wrote that Romney "came off as a phony, even when he was perfectly sincere." Romney's staff would conclude that competing as a candidate of social conservatism and ideological purity rather than of pragmatic competence had been a mistake.

Romney finished in second place by 5 percentage points to the resurgent McCain in the next-door-to-his-home-state New Hampshire primary on January 8. Romney rebounded to win the January 15 Michigan primary over McCain by a solid margin, capitalizing on his childhood ties to the state and his vow to bring back lost automotive industry jobs which was seen by several commentators as unrealistic.|group="nb"}} On January 19, Romney won the lightly contested Nevada caucuses, but placed fourth in the intense South Carolina primary, where he had effectively ceded the contest to his rivals. McCain gained further momentum with his win in South Carolina, leading to a showdown between him and Romney in the Florida primary.

For ten days, Romney campaigned intensively on economic issues and the burgeoning subprime mortgage crisis, while McCain repeatedly, and inaccurately, asserted that Romney favored a premature withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.|group="nb"}} McCain won key last-minute endorsements from Florida Senator Mel Martinez and Governor Charlie Crist, which helped push him to a 5 percentage point victory on January 29. Although many Republican officials were now lining up behind McCain, Romney persisted through the nationwide Super Tuesday contests on February 5. There he won primaries or caucuses in several states, including Massachusetts, Alaska, Minnesota, Colorado and Utah, but McCain won more, including large states such as California and New York. Trailing McCain in delegates by a more than two-to-one margin, Romney announced the end of his campaign on February 7 during a speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

Altogether, Romney had won 11 primaries and caucuses, received about 4.7 million total votes, and garnered about 280 delegates.

Romney endorsed McCain for president a week later. He became one of the McCain campaign's most visible surrogates, appearing on behalf of the GOP nominee at fundraisers, state Republican party conventions, and on cable news programs. His efforts earned McCain's respect and the two developed a warmer relationship; he was on the nominee's short list for the vice presidential running mate slot, where his economic expertise would have balanced one of McCain's weaknesses. McCain, behind in the polls, opted instead for a high-risk, high-reward "game changer", and selected Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. McCain lost the election to Democratic Senator Barack Obama.

Activity between presidential campaigns

Following the election, Romney paved the way for a possible 2012 presidential campaign by using his Free and Strong America PAC to raise money for other Republican candidates and to pay for salaries and consulting fees for his existing political staff. A network of former staff and supporters around the nation were eager for him to run again. He continued to give speeches and raise campaign funds on behalf of fellow Republicans, but turned down many potential media appearances so as not to become overexposed. He also spoke before business, educational, and motivational groups. He served on the board of directors of Marriott International for a second time (his first tenure was from 1993 to 2002) from 2009 to 2011.

The Romneys sold their main home in Belmont and their ski house in Utah, leaving them an estate along Lake Winnipesaukee in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and an oceanfront home in the La Jolla district of San Diego, California, which they had bought the year before. Both locations were near some of the Romneys' grandchildren, who by 2011 numbered sixteen. The San Diego location was also ideal for Ann Romney's multiple sclerosis therapies and for recovering from her late 2008 diagnosis and lumpectomy for mammary ductal carcinoma in situ. Romney maintained his voting registration in Massachusetts, however, and bought a smaller condominium in Belmont during 2010. Romney was an early supporter of Scott Brown, the successful Republican candidate in that race. Some of Romney's former aides were used by Brown's campaign and Romney raised funds for Brown.|group="nb"}} In February 2010, Romney had a minor altercation with LMFAO member Skyler Gordy, known as Sky Blu, on an airplane flight.

Romney's book, ''No Apology: The Case for American Greatness'', was released in March 2010; an 18-state book tour was undertaken. The book, which debuted atop ''The New York Times'' Best Seller list, avoided anecdotes about Romney's personal or political life and focused on a presentation of his economic and geopolitical views. Earnings from the book were donated to charity.

In nationwide opinion polling for the 2012 Republican Presidential primaries, he led polls or placed in the top three with Palin and Huckabee. A January 2010 ''National Journal'' survey of political insiders found that a majority of Republican insiders, and a plurality of Democratic insiders, predicted Romney would become the party's 2012 nominee. Romney campaigned heavily for Republican candidates in the 2010 midterm elections, and raised the most funds of any of the prospective 2012 Republican presidential candidates. Beginning in early 2011, Romney presented a more relaxed visual image.

2012 presidential campaign

On April 11, 2011, Romney announced in a video taped outdoors at the University of New Hampshire that he had formed an exploratory committee for a run for the Republican presidential nomination. A Quinnipiac University political science professor stated, "We all knew that he was going to run. He's really been running for president ever since the day after the 2008 election."

Romney stood to possibly gain from the Republican electorate's tendency to nominate candidates who had previously run for president and appeared to be "next in line" to be chosen. Perhaps his greatest hurdle in gaining the Republican nomination was party opposition to the Massachusetts health care reform law that he had signed five years earlier. The early stages of the race found Romney as the apparent front-runner in a weak field, especially in terms of fundraising prowess and organization. As many potential Republican candidates decided not to run (including Mike Pence, John Thune, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, and Mitch Daniels), Republican party figures searched for plausible alternatives to Romney.

On June 2, 2011, Romney formally announced the start of his campaign. Speaking on a farm in Stratham, New Hampshire, he focused on the economy and criticized President Obama's handling of it. He said, "In the campaign to come, the American ideals of economic freedom and opportunity need a clear and unapologetic defense, and I intend to make it – because I have lived it."

Romney raised $56 million during 2011, far more than any of his Republican opponents, and refrained from spending any of his own money on his campaign. He initially ran a low-key, low-profile campaign. Michele Bachmann staged a brief surge, then by September 2011, Romney's chief rival in polls was a recent entrant, Texas Governor Rick Perry, and the two exchanged sharp criticisms of each other during a series of debates among the Republican candidates. The October 2011 decisions of Chris Christie and Sarah Palin not to run finally settled the field. Perry faded due to poor performances in those debates, while Herman Cain staged a long-shot surge until allegations of sexual misconduct derailed him.

Romney continued to seek support from a wary Republican electorate, with his poll numbers relatively flat and at a historically low level for a Republican frontrunner at this point in the race. After the charges of flip flopping that marked his 2008 campaign began to accumulate again, Romney declared in November 2011 that "I've been as consistent as human beings can be." In the final month before voting began, Newt Gingrich enjoyed a major surge, taking a solid lead in national polls and in most of the early caucus and primary states before settling back into parity or worse with Romney following a barrage of negative ads from Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney Super PAC.

In the initial 2012 Iowa caucuses of January 3, Romney was announced as the victor on election night with 25 percent of the vote, edging out a late-surging Rick Santorum by eight votes (with an also-surging Ron Paul finishing third), but sixteen days later, Santorum was certified as the winner by a 34-vote margin. Romney decidedly won the New Hampshire primary the following week with a total of 39 percent; Paul finished second and Jon Huntsman third.

In the run-up to the South Carolina Republican primary, Gingrich launched attack ads criticizing Romney for causing job losses while at Bain Capital, Perry referred to Romney's role there as "vulture capitalism", and Sarah Palin questioned whether Romney could prove his claim that 100,000 jobs were created during that time. Many conservatives rallied in defense of Romney and the implied criticism of free-market capitalism. However, during two debates, Romney fumbled questions about releasing his income tax returns, while Gingrich surged with audience-rousing attacks on the debate moderators. Combined with the delayed loss in Iowa, Romney's admitted bad week resulted in a previous double-digit lead in polls – and chance to end the race early – turning into a 13-point loss to Gingrich in the January 21 primary and a decision afterward to release his returns quickly. The race turned to the Florida Republican primary, where in debates, appearances, and advertisements, Romney unleashed a concerted, unrelenting attack on Gingrich's past record and associations and current electability. Romney enjoyed a big spending advantage from both his campaign and his aligned Super PAC, and after a record-breaking rate of negative ads from both sides, Romney won Florida on January 31, gaining 46 percent of the vote to Gingrich's 32 percent.

February saw a number of caucuses and primaries; Santorum won three in a single night early in the month, propelling him into a lead in national and some state polls and positioning him as Romney's main rival, while Romney won the other five, including a closely fought contest in his home state of Michigan at the end of the month. In the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses of March 6, Romney won six of ten contests, including a narrow victory in Ohio over a greatly-outspent Santorum, and despite not landing a knockout blow to end the race, still held a more than two-to-one edge over Santorum in total delegates. Romney maintained that delegate margin through subsequent contests, and Santorum stopped his campaign on April 10. Following a sweep of five more contests on April 24, the Republican National Committee declared Romney to be the party's presumptive nominee and put its resources behind him.

Political positions and public perceptions

For much of his business career, Romney did not take public political positions. He followed national politics avidly in college, and the circumstances of his father's presidential campaign loss would grate on him for decades, but his early philosophical influences were often non-political, such as in his missionary days when he read and absorbed Napoleon Hill's pioneering self-help tome ''Think and Grow Rich'' and encouraged his colleagues to do the same. Until his 1994 U.S. Senate campaign, he was registered as an Independent. In the 1992 Democratic Party presidential primaries, he had voted for the Democratic former senator from the state, Paul Tsongas.

In the 1994 Senate race, Romney aligned himself with Republican Massachusetts Governor William Weld, saying "I think Bill Weld's fiscal conservatism, his focus on creating jobs and employment and his efforts to fight discrimination and assure civil rights for all is a model that I identify with and aspire to." As a gubernatorial candidate in 2002, and then initially as Governor of Massachusetts, Romney again generally operated in the mold established by Weld and followed by Weld's two other Republican successors, Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift: restrain spending and taxing, be tolerant or permissive on social issues, protect the environment, be tough on crime, try to appear post-partisan.

Later during his time as governor, Romney's position on abortion changed in conjunction with a similar change of position on stem cell research.|group="nb"}} Also during that time, his position or choice of emphasis on some aspects of gay rights,|group="nb"}} and some aspects of abstinence-only sex education,|group="nb"}} evolved in a more conservative direction. The change in 2005 on abortion was the result of what Romney described as an epiphany experienced while investigating stem cell research issues. He later said, "Changing my position was in line with an ongoing struggle that anyone has that is opposed to abortion personally, vehemently opposed to it, and yet says, 'Well, I'll let other people make that decision.' And you say to yourself, but if you believe that you're taking innocent life, it's hard to justify letting other people make that decision."

This increased alignment with traditional conservatives on social issues coincided with Romney's becoming a candidate for the 2008 Republican nomination for President. He displayed a new-found admiration for the National Rifle Association and portrayed himself as a lifelong hunter. In April 2007, he said, "I've been a hunter pretty much all my life," but then said he had only gone hunting twice and did not own guns, and "I'm not a big-game hunter. I've made that very clear. I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will. I began when I was 15 or so and I have hunted those kinds of varmints since then. More than two times."|group="nb"}} He downplayed the Massachusetts health care law, became a convert on signing an anti-tax pledge, and backed away from further closings of corporate tax loopholes. He also displayed aggressiveness on foreign policy matters such as wanting to double the number of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Skeptics, including some Republicans, charged Romney with opportunism and having a lack of core principles. The fervor with which Romney adopted his new stances and attitudes contributed to the perception of inauthenticity which hampered that campaign.

While there have been many biographical parallels between the lives of George Romney and his son Mitt, There are also obvious differences in their paths, including that George had a hardscrabble upbringing while Mitt's was affluent, and that Mitt far exceeded George's accomplishments in formal education. Another is that Mitt's personality is more reserved, private, and controlled than his father's was, traits he got from his mother Lenore.|group="nb"}} one particular difference is that while George was willing to defy political trends, Mitt has been much more willing to adapt to them. Mitt Romney has said that learning from experience and changing views accordingly is a virtue, and that, "If you're looking for someone who's never changed any positions on any policies, then I'm not your guy." Romney responded to criticisms of ideological pandering with the explanation that "The older I get, the smarter Ronald Reagan gets."

Journalist and author Daniel Gross sees Romney as approaching politics in the same terms as a business competing in markets, in that successful executives do not hold firm to public stances over long periods of time, but rather constantly devise new strategies and plans to deal with new geographical regions and ever-changing market conditions. Political profiler Ryan Lizza sees the same question regarding whether Romney's business skills can be adapted to politics, saying that "while giving customers exactly what they want may be normal in the corporate world, it can be costly in politics". Writer Robert Draper holds a somewhat similar perspective: "The Romney curse was this: His strength lay in his adaptability. In governance, this was a virtue; in a political race, it was an invitation to be called a phony." Writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells sees Romney as a detached problem solver rather than one who approaches political issues from a humanistic or philosophical perspective. Journalist Neil Swidey views Romney as a political and cultural enigma, "the product of two of the most mysterious and least understood subcultures in the country: the Mormon Church and private-equity finance," and believes that has led to the continued interest in a 1983 episode in which Romney went on a long trip with the family dog on the roof of his car. Since becoming public in 2007, the story has been the source of complaints from animal lovers, a point of psychological study regarding Romney's emotion-free crisis management, an obsession to ''New York Times'' columnist Gail Collins, and the occasional target of news stories, talk show hosts and political rivals.|group="nb"}} Political writer Joe Klein sees Romney as actually more conservative on social issues than he portrayed himself during his Massachusetts campaigns and less conservative on other issues than his presidential campaigns have represented, and concludes that Romney "has always campaigned as something he probably is not."

Immediately following the March 2010 passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Romney attacked the landmark legislation as "an unconscionable abuse of power" and said the act should be repealed. The hostile attention it held among Republicans created a potential problem for the former governor, since the new federal law was in many ways similar to the Massachusetts health care reform passed during Romney's term; as one Associated Press article stated, "Obamacare ... looks a lot like Romneycare." While acknowledging that his plan was not perfect and still was a work in progress, Romney did not back away from it, and has consistently defended the state-level health insurance mandate that underpins it. He has focused on its having had bipartisan support in the state legislature, while the Obama plan received no Republican support at all in Congress, and upon it being the right answer to Massachusetts' specific problems at the time. While Romney has not explicitly argued for a federally imposed mandate, and as of 2010 explicitly opposes one, during his 1994 Senate campaign he indicated he would vote for an overall health insurance proposal that contained one, and he suggested during his time as governor and during his 2008 presidential campaign that the Massachusetts plan was a model for the nation and that, over time, mandate plans might be adopted by most or all of the nation.

Throughout his business, Olympics, and political career, Romney's instinct has been to apply the "Bain way" towards problems. Romney has said, "There were two key things I learned at Bain. One was a series of concepts for approaching tough problems and a problem-solving methodology; the other was an enormous respect for data, analysis, and debate." He has written, "There are answers in numbers – gold in numbers. Pile the budgets on my desk and let me wallow." Romney believes the Bain approach is not only effective in the business realm but also in running for office and, once there, in solving political conundrums such as proper Pentagon spending levels and the future of Social Security. Former Bain and Olympics colleague Fraser Bullock has said of Romney, "He's not an ideologue. He makes decisions based on researching data more deeply than anyone I know." Romney's technocratic instincts have thus always been with him; in his public appearances during the 2002 gubernatorial campaign he sometimes gave PowerPoint presentations rather than conventional speeches. Upon taking office he became, in the words of ''The Boston Globe'', "the state's first self-styled CEO governor". During his 2008 presidential campaign, he was constantly asking for data, analysis, and opposing arguments, and has been viewed as a potential "CEO president".

Awards and honors

Romney has received four honorary doctorates: an Honorary Doctor of Business from the University of Utah in 1999, an Honorary Doctor of Law from Bentley College in 2002, an Honorary Doctor of Public Administration from Suffolk University Law School in 2004, and an Honorary Doctor of Public Service from Hillsdale College in 2007.

''People'' magazine included Romney in its 50 Most Beautiful People list for 2002. In 2004, Romney received the inaugural Truce Ideal Award for his role in the 2002 Winter Olympics. In 2006, he received the Secretary of Defense Employer Support Freedom Award, the highest recognition given by the U.S. Government to employers for their support of their employees who serve in the National Guard and Reserve, on behalf of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 2008, he shared with his wife Ann the Canterbury Medal from The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, for "refus[ing] to compromise their principles and faith" during the presidential campaign. In 2012, Romney was named to the ''Time'' 100.

Writings

See also

List of JD/MBAs

List of richest American politicians

Mitt Romney presidential campaign, 2012

Republican Party presidential debates, 2012

Republican Party presidential primaries, 2012

Republican Party vice presidential candidates, 2012

Results of the 2012 Republican Party presidential primaries

Notes

References

Bibliography

External links

;Official

MittRomney.com

;Other

Campaign Contributions made by Mitt Romney at NewsMeat

Press releases as Governor of Massachusetts 2003–2007

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