Last week, I provided you with some quick Thomson Reuters data about Q3 M&A and private equity deal activity (both U.S. and global). A bunch of you have requested more detailed numbers, preferably in some sort of downloadable format that you can send to friends and neighbors. Sounds fair, so here you go: trmadata (it's a .pdf).
1 min read · 08 October 2008
* Global rate cuts in order to slow the global freefall. * How your face should look at various levels of market collapse. (h/t DealBreaker) * Vinod Khosla is not a fan of T. Boone Pickens' plan. In terms of investments, he's looking for clean energy "black swans." * Carl Icahn asks you to join the United Shareholders of America. * Brokaw's first "discussion" question last night was the one I asked two weeks ago. Unfortunately, neither candidate answered it except to invoke Warren Buffett (who I can't really see leaving Nebraska). Heidi did some live-blogging on the economic parts.
1 min read · 08 October 2008
2 min read · 07 October 2008
1 min read · 07 October 2008
Allan Thygesen has left The Carlyle Group, in order to launch a new early-stage VC firm. The stealth firm has enough partner capital to do select angel deals, but will begin pre-marketing its debut fund late this year. Formal fund-raising is expected to commence in early 2009. “When we set this in motion late last year, we hadn’t quite foreseen the global economic meltdown,” Thygesen explains. “So we’ll wait a bit longer than we had expected, and probably target a bit less money.” He declined to identify his two partners, except to say one was a longtime VC with prior operating experience, and that the other was a pure operator. Thygesen originally joined Carlyle in 2001, as a San Francisco-based managing director of what was then called Carlyle Venture Partners. The group has since evolved
2 min read · 06 October 2008
Last Monday, Delaware Chancery Court found that Apollo Management portfolio company Hexion must honor its merger agreement with Huntsman, after rejecting Apollo’s claim that Huntsman had experienced an adverse material event. This is obviously bad news for Apollo and Hexion, but could have wider reverberations. That’s the message coming from NYPPEX, an online marketplace for trading “secondary” stakes in private equity funds. The company has issued client research warning that stakes in Apollo’s fifth, sixth and seventh funds could decline “12% to 20% over the next six months” (Apollo holds Hexion in both Funds V and VI, as it was a rollup). Both broadly speaking, NYPPEX says that other buyout funds vintage 2005-2007 could be vulnerable to similar
1 min read · 06 October 2008
For the past few months, peHUB has been serializing an upcoming book by Michael Butler, chairman and CEO of Seattle-based investment bank Cascadia Capital. He’s now done writing, so he sits down for 5 Questions: 1. Why did you decide to write a book? I was thinking about how much the world was starting to change, but that a lot of people in finance were so deep that they couldn’t pull their heads up to see it. What’s happened over the last couple of week reinforced that. I don’t think most people of Wall Street – and I have a lot of friends there because I used to work at Lehman – have a sense of just how pissed off
2 min read · 03 October 2008
Last night I attended Highland Capital Partners’ 20th anniversary party, which commandeered the entire Boston Science Museum. Quite the bash, including a 3-on-3 basketball tournament for Highland portfolio companies (won by O Beverages), the Celtics championship trophy (I touched it), Celtics cheerleaders (I didn’t touch them), CEOs, limited partners, local politicians and former Melrose Place star Andrew Shue. Perhaps the best VC event I’ve ever been to in Boston, even though it wasn’t for area VCs (only one I saw was Howard Anderson, and he’s quite explicitly not a VC anymore). Very ebullient crowd on the surface, but things were pretty different when it came to one-on-one conversations. These were all off-the-record, but it's fair to say that I heard things that sound like a step beyond the tip of a glacier. Not just general credit concerns, but deals that have collapsed at the last minute due to pulled financing, new funds that can’t close because of cancelled commitments, LPs trying to quickly reduce asset class
2 min read · 03 October 2008
1 min read · 02 October 2008
Lehman Brothers just issued a statement on the status of the investment management groups that are not included in the proposed sale to Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman. It doesn’t shed much light, although it also doesn’t discourage widespread speculation that the groups will soon transform themselves into independent entities. Here it is: As specified in a recent press release, the proposed sale of Neuberger Investment Management and several related asset management business units to Bain Capital Partners, LLC and Hellman & Friedman LLC does not include Lehman Brothers' major direct private equity businesses such as Merchant Banking, Real Estate, Venture Capital and MLP. However, the investment teams for these funds remain intact and focused as we actively pursue the best strategic alternatives for these businesses going forward. As always, a primary consideration is the best interests of our investors. While we wait for definitive plans, there are still a pair of questions worth pondering: 1. What will happen to each fund's uncalled commitments from Lehman Brothers? For example, the dearly-deceased bank promised
2 min read · 02 October 2008
