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...predict that private equity will go through a shakeout similar to what we've seen in the housing market. How does that analogy work? Private-equity firms used the same cheap credit that caused the housing bubble to buy companies. There are about 100 of these firms - KKR, Blackstone and Carlyle are some of the bigger ones - and they buy a company the same way we would buy a house. Put down about 20% and borrow about 80%. The big difference is, the company they're buying borrows the 80%, so they're the ones responsible for repayment. These loans...
...think the private-equity industry will be the next one to line up for bailout money? Yes. It's already happened with GMAC. You know, private-equity firms are very well connected. Four of the last eight Treasury secretaries currently work for private-equity firms...
...there anything we could do now to prevent this wave from coming? Probably not much. One of the main points of the book is to show how private equity and leveraged buyouts don't work, and even if the credit crisis I'm predicting doesn't happen - even if the economy recovers and some of the companies can refinance and push their debt off - the core practice is still destructive. Many of these companies will fall apart anyway. In the 1980s, when Michael Milken was funding buyouts, 52% of the biggest 25 companies acquired ended up going bankrupt...
...Iran's reversal after initially approving the deal was that Green Movement leaders had criticized it. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the opposition candidate who claims to have won the disputed election, criticized the proposal negotiated by Ahmadinejad's team at Vienna, warning that if implemented, it would negate the work of thousands of Iranian scientists. Opposition figures and analysts say his response was merely an attempt to play spoiler and prevent the regime from benefiting politically from a deal with the West. Still, nuclear diplomacy with the West has effectively become a political football in Tehran, complicating President Obama's quest...
...trial of Sabahuddin Ahmed for his work in facilitating last year's Mumbai massacre reveals an uncomfortable truth about India. Unlike his fellow accused, the Pakistani gunman Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab, Sabahuddin is Indian and for five years he was an alleged one-man sleeper cell hiding in plain sight. Even though he was arrested almost 10 months before the Mumbai attack, Sabahuddin had allegedly managed to provide enough information in terms of directions and diagrams to allow the terrorists to launch their assault with "absolute precision...