Around the world with Congressional investments

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Over the course of the last week, it’s become heavily fashionable in some circles to criticize Mitt Romney for his outrageously outrageous policy of taking his money and putting it in places that like to have money in them. According to his tax records, he keeps some of his money overseas, which ultimately lead the Obama campaign to claim that he was defrauding the IRS, by apparently reporting all of the money he made on his tax returns, including money made in “tax shelters” overseas. Which he also reported to the IRS.

Meaning, of course, that either his secretive tax shelters are not secretive at all, or he’s working an accountant that is totally missing the point of being a dastardly international billionaire villain. Doing it wrong, my friend.  Doing it wrong.

At any rate, everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Debbie Wasserman Schultz have made it their mission to address this Romney shortsightedness ad nauseum in their recent public appearances, chastising the former Massachusetts governor for “betting against the American economy” by pouring some of his investment capital into Cayman bank accounts. All of this would, of course, be just find and dandy except that Nancy and Debbie seem to have some flaws in their own strategic moneymaking strategies.

As in, they’re heavily into foreign investments.

According to Pelosi’s 2011 financial disclosure statement, the Democratic House Minority Leader received between $1 million and $5 million in partnership income from ”Matthews International Capital Management LLC,” a group that emphasizes that it has a “A Singular Focus on Investing in Asia.” A quick trip to the company website reveals a featured post extolling the virtues of outsourcing.

“Designed in California, Made in Manila” sounds like an excellent title for a smear ad to be run the by the Barack Obama campaign. Instead, it appears to be Nancy Pelosi’s investment strategy.

Turns out,  Pelosi is also a minor investor in the embattled “Moduslink Global,”which Matt Lewis notes is one of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad “outsourcing pioneers” that Mitt Romney single-handedly created and directed in his dungeon laboratories at Bain Capital even though he really had very little to do with, even during his time at Bain Capital.

Debbie, on the other hand, is even more effusive with her European financial endeavors.

But disclosure forms reveal that in 2010, Wasserman Schultz invested between $1,001-$15,000 in a 401k retirement fund run by Davis Financial Fund. As the fund discloses, it is invested in the Julius Baer Group Ltd. and the State Bank of India GDR Ltd., as well as other financial, insurance, bank institutions….”The Julius Baer Group is the leading Swiss private banking group, focusing exclusively on the demands of sophisticated private clients, family offices and external asset managers from around the world,” its website explains.

Similarly, according to disclosure forms from 2004, Wasserman Schultz had holdings in the Fidelity Advisor Overseas Fund. That fund is invested in HSBC bank (a British financial institution), Hengdeli Holdings (a Hong Kong watch company), Novo Nordisk (a Danish drug company), Volkswagen (a German auto company), Rakuten (a Japanese shipping business), Richemont Cie Financiere (a Swiss luxury goods company), and many others.

And that might only be the tip of the iceberg. Although Debbie is recently famous for harping on Mitt Romney’s refusing to release his tax returns from before he was born, Debbie hasn’t made her own income tax returns public.

None of this is illegal. But of course, that’s beside the point, which is, of course, that investing any money outside the US is tantamount to economic treason or betting against the future of America or personally asphyxiating an American worker with one hand while burning the collected works of John Steinbeck with the other and peeing on a GM truck. It’s bad. Because, obviously. And now, of course, we know why Tim Geithner just didn’t pay his taxes. It was just too much of a risk.