I'm more offended by the pompous vanity of the 2nd construction - because Obama did some neighborhood organizing, he knows how to think about workers where jobs have been outsourced.

Except that he favored banks over the unemployed in determining his stimulus. He favored the banks over those unemployed when they came for the unemployed's houses. From what I call, supporting GMAC & Cerberus / Chrysler Financial to get 100% on the dollar was prime requirement of the bailout (taxpayers still own 70% of GMAC now Allied, something like $11 billion, as it just failed its stress tests, and lost about $1.6 billion on Chrysler). He favored pharma and health insurance companies when devising the "universal health care". And he still signed questionable free trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia that seem to hurt worker conditions and lose jobs to outsourcing.

As for hedge funds, I've been on the ugly side of tech for some time - companies that can't compete, have interesting ideas, but hard to turn them around even with better management or new technology. Sometimes they can be merged, parts of the tech integrated with viable parts of other companies to create more viable companies. And then sometimes there are companies that really just need a source of funding to hit their next big stride. And then sometimes companies just passed their shelflife, and the only humane thing to do is dismantle them.

But it's a huge salad, and I think it's ridiculous to say that hedge funds are purely devoted to making money - of course that's their major goal, but they're generally functioning on an angle, whether improving management efficiency, identifying & funding the "next big thing", finding ripe companies with a lot of cash on hand to pocket it, figuring out the right tax angles for client portfolios, finding company synergies, etc. 

One of the reasons the US market continues to grow is because of easier access to capital, and while the theft in the system needs to be wrung out, 

As ugly as strategy #3 is, it's taking advantage of a certain level of financial mismanagement or incompetence, not that it can't be looked at better from a shark's angle as rather immoral and adding nothing in productivity, only encouraging short-sighted fear and lock-ins.

However, much of the business Romney was involved in should have been simply illegal - underfunding obligations, breaking contracts, sticking pensions on the taxpayer if the pensions were covered at all.

At the same time, what was the auto bailout but a loaded restructuring with workers taking their pay and benefits cuts. ($14 per hour for new workers? and these aren't guys sweeping the floor - those jobs were outsourced long ago). While Wall Street execs & traders kept their bonuses - too important to fail.

Even if there's no hedge fund, many companies do the same thing internally - HP in the middle of a gut-wrenching reorganization now after betting on too many wrong horses the last couple years, Blackberry trying to stave off extinction, other companies selling off or shutting down certain divisions etc. Some of this is done under foolish instructions from shortsighted investors & CEOs, some of it is done from a realistic recognition of market competition and failure to perform or need for cash - short-term or long-term.

Anyway, I hate the soundbites, and I think they still miss what's wrong with Romney, even if they seem to be successful with potential voters.

Although unlikely to penetrate the Obamanot cloud that you are always immersed within, in saying 'now that's appropriate' Obama referred to the immediately previous phrase 'maximize returns for investors'.

Before that, Obama's description of hedge funds managers 'job' to 'make money', 'not to create jobs', 'not even to create a successful business' clearly indicated Obama was not 'OK' with hedge funds. Obama has also proposed raising taxes on them, which is a big reason they despise him.

True or False: CEO's and Boards of Directors of publicly held corporations have a legal duty to maximize shareholder wealth?

I have, incorrectly I learned this weekend from Lynn Stout's very short and excellent 2012 book The Shareholder Value Myth, believed that to be correct and stated it as such.  I stand corrected.  Stout demolishes a number of other false beliefs about corporations associated with the shareholder value belief structure, such as that, as Milton Friedman claimed in 1970, shareholders "own" corporations.  Of greater potential interest to investors and policymakers, she also reviews several types of evidence suggesting that shareholder-wealth maximization policies, facilitated by a number of policy changes over the past 2 or 3 decades, have not led to better results--for shareholders themselves, let alone other corporate stakeholders. 

Stout points out that shareholders are individual people or institutional investors who have widely varying interests and desires, which are often mutually incompatible.  The "shareholder value" philosophy which has been dominant in our society for several decades now (but was not always so) as reflecting the true purpose of public corporations is based on a notion of a single, "Platonic ideal" type of shareholder whose interest is solely in today's market price of a corporation's equity.  Whereas real shareholders have different time frames, different degrees of diversification, different attitudes towards sacrificing personal wealth to follow ethical rules and avoid harming others, etc.  As she writes,"conventional shareholder value thinking reconciles different shareholders' conflicting desires by simply assuming the conflicts away."

Reading it prompted me to reflect on where/how I acquired the belief about Board/CEO legal duty to maximize shareholder wealth. 

One likely possibility, although this is going back a long time now--is the Corporations Law course I took at the University of Chicago circa 1984, which happened to be taught by Dan Fischel.  Fischel is co-author of a leading 1991 "law and economics" textbook that takes this point of view.  IF he taught this view as reflecting the state of the law at that time, as opposed to his personal preference on what the law should be--and it's a long time ago so I don't know that that was the case--then I and many fellow students over the years were badly served by him. 

Marjorie Kelly, in her book The Divine Right of Capital, a book I admire, apparently also stated this as a correct statement of current law.  So that could have been another source.  But, really, that view appears to be so widespread that I or others mistaken about this might have gotten that belief from any number of sources.

Of much clearer direct relevance to the subject of this thread, Stout cites an empirical study of activist hedge funds by Bill Bratton at the University of Pennsylvania which concludes: "Activist hedge funds look for four things in their targets--potential sale of the whole, potential sale of a part, free cash, and cuttable costs." (p. 69)  (None of which is inconsistent with your comments in the thread, PP.)  Stout is pretty clearly anti-hedge fund, noting negative but no positive effects they have.  She is a law professor, active with many organizations and projects, who would surely be seen by the hedge fund crowd as a corporate director apologist.   

Bratton article, "Hedge Funds and Corporate Governance", 95 Georgetown Law Review, 2007, is at: http://georgetownlawjournal.org/files/pdf/95-5/BRATTON.pdf  From the closing part of the abstract:

Meanwhile, the financial results also show that hedge fund activism is a more benign phenomenon than its critics would have us believe.  Hedge fund interventions neither amount to near-term hold ups nor revive the 1980s leveraged restructuring.  Short term investments are rare.  Large cash payouts have been made by only a minority of the firms surveyed, and borrowing has been the mode of finance in only a minority of the payout cases.