arizona1 -- speaking as once an attorney who led teams running deals for parties to various kinds of large deals (and thus was directly engaged in the negotiation and structuring of the deals) -- though I never directly ran into (or represented) Bain on a deal, a number of times ran into other parties to negotiations who sought to play that game -- it's not so much audacity, as to them it's not audacious just how they play the game, as it is a quite thorough and quite thoroughly sociopathic lack of character and integrity (and correspondingly, more at least some character and integrity than any lack of audacity on the part of the many more who don't see/play what they do in that particular way) -- my advice always was, the way to handle them is, as soon as and however they sling bullshit and/or break their word tell them no and be ready to walk -- that way you find out if they even seriously want the deal; if they do, they'll cave, and at least you've set down some little semblance of groundrules -- life's too short to put up with that sort of two-bit punk crap, let alone to put up with getting worn down by it -- and most of my clients were right there with me on that -- groups who operate like that, as Romney/Bain apparently quite openly and notoriously did, scurry around looking for vulnerable or just weak target management teams that they can bully as much as they do looking for anything else