Get A Grip

摘要

Like professional wrestling, private equity has a butch subculture that is hard to take entirely seriously. One of its defining characteristics is never, ever, to admit to a mistake in public. By convention, most buy-out bosses maintain that they anticipated a recession and acted cautiously. In reality, the buy-out industry had its big-gest-ever binge just before the bust began. Most big firms paid silly prices for companies using sillier levels of debt. A reminder of just how reckless some deals were was provided on November 26th by bce, a Canadian telecoms firm and the target of the second-largest buy-out bid on record. Its auditors judged that if the transaction went ahead the company would become technically insolvent.