Carlyle Near Collapse After Defaulting on $16B

Private equity threatens lawsuit as financing dries up

(NEWSER) - The pending sale of part of Home Depot took an ugly turn last night as three banks and three private equity firms entered into a showdown over financing. Home Depot dropped its asking price by over $1 billion, but the banks involved—JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch—have threatened to withdraw from a deal that may become the first casualty of the credit crunch. 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»

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»

Debt tightens as profits fall for many acquired companies

(NEWSER) - After a nearly 3-year buyout spree, private equity firms are facing tightened credit conditions just as slumping consumer spending squeezes many of their acquisitions, the New York Times reports. The leveraged-buyout bubble that culminated in $796 billion in deals in 2007 is bursting, leading to a grim reckoning as firms saddled with the debt used to buy them are unable to secure fresh credit to weather the downturn. More»