Erin Griffith

This is what happens when tens of thousands of laid-off bankers have a lot of time on their hands. They create YouTube videos of Bernard Madoff rapping. About Libor. And 2 & 20. If that didn't sate your novelty Madoff hunger, there's the Bernard Madoff ringtone, comprised of phrases from his famous "fraud" speech. Both via Cityfile.

What a Find: A family finds $10,000 in cash in a box of Annie's Organic crackers purchased from Whole Foods. In a most-improbable zany mix-up, the cash turns out to be some lady's life savings. "The Lake Forest woman, whose identity was not released, had lost faith in her bank and decided the box would be a safer place for the money." Apparently not. (Business Pundit) The Anonymous Equity Private: Speaks with Marketplace, leaving a few clues as to her identity. (HT AR). Now Hiring: A Job Posting for a Wall Streeter interesting in gaming from A VC. Get Over It Guys: Even though it is completely irrational in a recession, applications for luxury management MBA programs remains high. (BusinessWeek)

What are they going to do? There hasn’t been a new SPAC deal announced in months, after what seemed like a nonstop flurry of “SPAC-Attack!” announcements. Yet as I recall, SPACs raised $12 billion in 2007. According to research site SPAC Analytics, and 52 SPACs, or $10 billion worth, have yet to find an acquisition. If we subtract the $3.8 billion they raised in 2008, we can roughly estimate at least $6 billion worth of SPACs will be meeting their 18-month deadlines to strike a deal in the coming year. Even if they do find a willing seller, those SPACs have a boatload of headwinds working against them. For starters, you may have noticed the public markets have redefined ugly. SPACs have almost universally seen their share prices drop this year, which bodes poorly for getting a deal approved. Then we have the natural buyer of SPAC shares—hedge funds. It’s an understatement to say they’ve been blasted by redemptions. The blind pools are dry as the desert, and their shareholders have every motivation to vote against any proposed merger to get their money back.

Add one more bruise to the growing list of battered Apollo management investments. Analysts at Stifel Nicolaus believe Inkeepers USA, a hotel REIT investment made by the firm's publicly traded BDC, is heading for default in '09. For background, Apollo Investments is a BDC traded on NASDAQ under the ticker AINV. It makes equity, debt and senior secured loan investments across a variety of sectors and has a $1.34 billion market cap. You may remember the fund's CEO, John Hannan, resigned in November; he's been replaced by COO James Zelter. The fund took Innkeepers USA Trust private in April 2007 for $1.5 billion. According to the analyst report, the deal brought Innkeepers from 4x leverage to an estimated 10x proforma expected 2008 EBITDA (page nine has a nice before and after cap structure chart). The report states that the investment is "significantly underperforming," and likely to see a rocky '09.

Fired: The biggest CEO firings of 2008. (MSNBC) Gossipy: Wall Street Folly has a photo of George Soros partying with what the blog purports to be his "nieces" on New Years Eve, while afloat on his Octopus yacht. (Wall St. Folly) The Worst: Footnote of 2008 goes to...A. Schulman's fish camp! (Footnoted) Banned Words: This year the lists includes the likes of "Maverick," "staycation," game-changer," "green," and "Wall St./Main St." But I like the ones suggested in the comments of Paul Kedrosky's blog post about it, which includes "Joe the X," "print money" and "unprecedented times." (Infectious Greed)

The final list of 2008 LBO-backed bankruptcies has 49 Chapter 11s. Download it after the jump. Repeat offenders include our turnaround investing friends at Sun Capital and Cerberus and our non-turnaround investing friends at Catterton Partners, Carlyle Group, Thomas H. Lee Partners, and Madison Dearborn Partners. The auto industry tops the list as worst-hit, claiming 11 of the Ch. 11's. Tied with automotive is retail, with 11 more of the 11's. Three of those are furniture retailers. Beyond that it's a toss-up with transportation + airlines claiming six, three media properties, three consumer products vendors, and two restaurants. Four of the companies have emerged from bankruptcy; several others have headed for Chapter 7 liquidation. For the record, it's nice to revisit the 2007 list, which included all of

Hired: Missouri's Governor, by Solamere Capital. He'll work with Mitt Romney's son. (Springfield Business Journal) One VC's Wish List for '09: Including Facebook getting profitable and Google cutting products and services. (A VC) Looking for LPs?: Try the Church of England, which recently committed 150 GPB in Al Gore's investment firm, Generation Investment Management. (Religious Intelligence) Z2K: Do you own a Zune? Did you notice that it mysteriously failed to work at 12am, December 31? Engadget has the scoop on why.

The business world is full of silly sounding or near-meaningless corporatespeak clichés. Even worse, everyone repeats ‘em until they become official. Like most industries, private equity has its own ridiculous language. In the spirit of holiday light-heartedness, my Buyouts colleagues and I compiled some layman’s explanations of our favorite PE clichés, with everything from “Proprietary deal flow” to “Value add.” So remember, this is what journalists really think when we hear boiler plate clichés. Feel free to add your own. Feel very free. Happy New Year!

In the last month or so, coverage of private equity has gone from cautious to murky to bearish to downright apocalyptic. The descent has been so rapid, in fact, that it's almost rendered Michael Wolff's recent Vanity Fair article on private equity MOA (moot on arrival). His piece, titled "The Ultimate Bubble," asks the question on everyone's mind: Is private equity doomed, to what extent and which specific people or firms? Wolfe nails it when he says: "Chances are that what you're doing with your idle hours as a PE man is trying to figure out who deserves to crash and burn before you." (We at peHUB have our money on Apollo going down first, among the big boys) He makes the point that PE hasn't crashed yet, because we've yet to see much blood in the water, and that's partly because you all are so damn private. But in the time between his writing the article and it going to press, some of his arguments against a PE crash have now come to fruition! For example, he says, at least PE firms haven't given money back yet. TPG did so last week. He says PE firms haven't announced any layoffs. Enter Blackstone, Carlyle, American Capital, AIG, and probably others we don't know about. Add that to last week's dubious BCG study predicting almost half of all PE firms could cease to exist in the coming years. The study was met with a sneer (slightly from me, largely from commenters), yet the idea isn't that far-fetched. Both Wolff and BCG touch on a topic that may have started months ago as nervous whispers but has amplified to a worried roar and will only snowball in the new year: Private equity firms are in trouble. So in 2009, expect to defend your industry and reason to exist. There are a laundry list of things working against you right now. For his part, Wolff blasts PE for pretending to know how to

Yikes: Jim Cramer's advice was slightly worse than a coin toss this year. Lump Of Coal: The Naughtiest and nicest CEOs of 2008 (Bits) How The Other Side Lives (And Dies): Hedge fund return data is ugly. (Deal Journal) Ouch: If you though Credit Suisse's toxic debt alterna-bonus was bad, check out Google, which is giving its employees "dogfood." (Valleywag)