The Deal
Sunday, November 8, 
2:59 pm

Innovative Financing: Is PE's Golden Age over?

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The opening panel at The Deal’s Innovative Deal Financing conference explored what has become of “private equity’s golden age” in the face of a credit crunch that has brought LBO activity to a halt since August.

Moderated by The Deal's John Morris, the panel included Henry D'Alessandro, Vice Chairman, of leveraged financing at Morgan Stanley; Kim Davis, Managing Director, Charlesbank Capital Partners LLC; and Jim Epstien, Partner at Pepper Hamilton.

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The panelists agreed that things may have hit bottom as new issues are pricing, so it feels as if the healing process has begun. Yet there are some out there saying its only a dead-cat bounce.

The relative halt in new deals is starving the financing pipeline, so every day that there’s no new supply, is one day closer to recovery. The result being that as cash is building the buy-side may be moving from panic to getting back in, especially with the market rally over the past two weeks.

On the financing side:

  • There's a big question market over staple financing right now. Its not inconceivable that staples might go away.
  • In the middle market, deals are getting done, only the financing and deal flow is just not as robust. Things are back to old-style financing, where its term by term negotiation.

Going forward the panelists felt that:

  • Prices will come down, but its going to take sellers some time to adapt to that.
  • The market will clear out, but the aftereffects of 2006-2007 will be with us for 2-3 years.
  • Returns will be under pressure because of the high multiples paid. As the deals done since 2005 come to market for refinancing, the pain is going to be shared all around since they were originally financed at high multiples, ad they’ll be refinanced at lower multiples.
  • Even if there is a recession, it might not hit the covenant-lite deals because the terms were so loose.

The recent issues with a material adverse change in the buyout of Harmon and the potential for MAC with Sallie Mae is mostly about getting the price down.—George White

See the Deal’s Sept. 21 analysis of financing markets
See the Deal’s Sept. 7 analysis of private equity’s future





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