Private Equity: Boom and Bust?

The private equity or leveraged buyout (LBO) market in Europe and the U.S. has grown enormously over the last two decades, from $7.5 billion in 1991 to $500 billion in 2006. Much of the financing of recent transactions has come in the form of syndicated debt, which is dispersed after origination to many non‐bank financial institutions. This financing practice has two important possible consequences: First, bankers' incentives to engage in effective ex‐ante screening and ex‐post monitoring of deals have been weakened, which may have led to excessive lending while encouraging buyers to overpay. Consistent with this possibility, the authors provide new evidence that some recent transactions have occurred at very low EBITDA‐to‐capital ratios, financed with high levels of debt that recall those of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Second, there is a scarcity of information about the identity of the ultimate holders of the LBO debt; and as a consequence of the resulting uncertainty, a few defaults of major LBO deals could cause a drying up of new funding for financial institutions. The end result could be that the veil covering the repackaging of LBO debt converts a small shock to the LBO sector into a liquidity crisis for its financiers. Such liquidity problems could in turn affect not the financing and re‐financing of just LBO deals, but other as set classes as well, including lending by banks to public firms. The authors offer a number of suggestions for increasing the transparency of this market.