The Classic Sell Signal: MBAs want in to private equity

Not just the ahead-of-the curve ones, but all of them apparently.

Business schools are bullish on private equity.

Amid the recent flurry of deals to take public companies private, M.B.A. programs are offering more intensive private-equity courses and strengthening their connections with buyout firms to help students land jobs. At the same time, schools are trying to lure junior employees of buyout shops to their M.B.A. programs to groom them for higher-level positions in private equity.

"Private equity is the sexy industry where the money is being made and where many of our applicants want to be," says Rose Martinelli, associate dean for student recruitment and admissions at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Full article in the WSJ Career Journal

eBay Stares Down Google And Wins

Post on TechCrunch summarizing Ebay v. Google dueling parties. Minor issues blows up into big issue revealing a lot about the underlying tension among practically all the web giants...

Market Pressures Test Resiliance of Buyouts

This is the key figure re: the buyout boom. Bolding is mine. My guess is that someone is mispricing risk here...

The debt markets are a potentially bigger threat, though not clearly an immediate one. Investors have a huge appetite for corporate debt, in part because default rates are historically low, and are willing to accept relatively skimpy returns for it. In recent weeks, the additional interest that even the riskiest corporate bonds pay over Treasurys has fallen to a record low. This so-called spread, which is a proxy for investors' appetite for risk, is currently around 2.5 percentage points, according to Merrill Lynch data. It was at 3 percentage points at the start of this year, while in 2002 it stood at more than 10 percentage points.

From WSJ ($)

"Nobody fears failure"

From Dealbook article about PE lending getting "toppish"

At a conference in Tokyo earlier this month, the Carlyle Group's co-founder, David Rubenstein, admitted that with all the deal activity, it was inevitable that not all the investments were going to turn out well. "There hasn't been a failure for five years. We need to prepare people for the reality that some deals will fail," he said. He added: "Greed has taken over. Nobody fears failure."