Blackstone IPO Fetches $4.13B

Rumor mill heats up that company is going public soon

(NEWSER) - Here come the Facebook IPO rumors again. An insider tells Business Insider that employees expect the company to go public soon, possibly next month. "The IPO talk inside Facebook has ramped up the past 6 weeks and Zuckerberg repeatedly has said that it is 'coming,' which he *never* said in the history of Facebook," says the source's email. More»

Huge private equity company to open its books

(NEWSER) - The Carlyle Group is going public. The mammoth private equity company has filed paperwork with the SEC for what’s planned as a $100 million initial public offering, the Washington Post reports. The move will open its books to public scrutiny, shining a light on the array of 270 disparate businesses and properties it has a stake in. The group owns, for example, Nielsen Co., a truck transmission company, a Brazilian lingerie firm, Asian forests, and a string of Connecticut rest stops. More»

(USER SUBMITTED) - Seems the titans of Wall Street, and here we mean the private equity buyout shops including Warburg Pincus, Carlyle, TPG, and KKR, have amassed $500 billion to buy companies. Their problem? Not enough to buy and rising prices for what is out there. Plus it's a lot harder to leverage deals with debt in a post-bank-meltdown world. Read the full article . More»

It revamps stock but says it has no IPO plans 'at this time'

(NEWSER) - Facebook revamped its stock structure today in a move sure to heat up speculation that it's going public. The company will have two classes of shares, A and B, reports the Wall Street Journal . Everyone currently on board will hold B shares, with 10 times the voting power of A shares. That way if Facebook goes public, current shareholders—especially CEO Mark Zuckerberg—will have more say than any newcomers. More»

All the major players have survived so far

(NEWSER) - None of the major players in the "shadow banking" world of private equity—the likes of Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR—has yet gone bust, and the guessing game of which one will be first is well under way, reports Newser founder Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair. Don't hold your breath. The industry may indeed be "looking at imminent catastrophe and ruination," notes Wolff, but given the greater opportunities for bluffing in private equity, these firms just might be ideally suited to profit from everyone else's ruin. More»