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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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I do wonder if the next move though is for mid tier PE to go micro but do a lot of bolt ins to create a company of size that can then be flipped to a larger PE.

Already happening, but mid-tier PE is a disaster anyway, at least for now. Only reason megafunds are hanging on is self-dealing and selling to each other in a continuously growing scheme of propped up valuations that is liable to blow up at some point in the foreseeable future, as even they seem to be starting to admit.

PE is a cheap debt phenomenon, in an environment where money isn’t cheap it’s just building and operating a conglomerate / old school holding company with more steps, and you only have to go back to the 80s and early 90s to see that conglomerates are valued very differently to the kinds of multiples PE both works with, especially now.

The extreme micro isn’t happening.

And the PE success over the last ten years was cheap debt but PE has been successful for many years before cheap debt. KKR, BX, Warburg, etc have been around for a long time.

Rates in the developed world were on a long term downward trajectory from 1981 to 2021, which pretty much covers the entire period of that outsized success and which made PE more attractive for both investors in funds and for the funds themselves.

I guess it depends on what you mean by low rate environment. I tend to think pre financial crisis rates aren’t low.

Yeah, and also the period where hedgefundie’s big adventure strategy was backtested successfully. It was so obvious it would crash and burn when rates came up. Just-leverage-it-bro no longer infinite money printing machine, experts concede.

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