Private Equity Takes A Media Beating
Does the Private Equity Council have a bat phone? If so, now would be a good time to use it. In a one-two knockout, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg today published strongly worded anti-private equity columns: The former focusing on transparency, with an overarching theme of evil; and the latter focusing on debt, concluding quite brilliantly that debt is bad and private equity is risky. I'm not a private equity apologist, but both of these pieces seemed weak. There was no new angle or reporting. Each one simply rehashed well-known facts, without addressing arguments from the other side. The Wall Street Journal column, penned by AFL-CIO President Richard Trunka, revisits the New York Times' extensive coverage of THL Partners' big Simmons screw-up. I agree that that situation, and many others like it, is unfortunate. But I don't agree that alternative assets "operate as a shadow financial system" because they aren't required to disclose as much financial information as are publicly-traded companies or funds. Does that mean any large, privately-held business also is part of the seedy underbelly that is the shadow financial system?
