Erin Griffith

The Daily Deal: TPG’s $2 billon investment in WaMu looks bad, as its stock along with most financials plunged this week. But I disagree with the article’s assertion that a dismissed CEO is a cause for alarm. That move has been known to make a company’s stock rise in some cases. Either way, the point is, TPG’s lost $1.2 billion in a matter of days. PE Insider: Ventures West, one of the largest VC firms in Canada, is cutting its staff, including part time consultant and infectious greed blogger Paul Kedrosky. However, he didn’t blog about it. Dealbreaker: Is asking, ‘who’s next?’ Sad that I don’t even need to specify what they’re talking about to know. ...

S&P’s latest credit analysis blames this year's skyrocketing default rate on a lot of things, but the most common thread is private equity. The report, titled “Default Autopsy Finds Traces of Private Equity DNA,” lists the usual suspects (bad economy, high energy prices, low consumer confidence, high cost of capital) as reasons the sharp rise in global defaults. But the fact remains: Of the 55 defaults in the first eight months of this year, 70% were involved in transactions involving private equity. The excuse S&P offers is one I don’t fully buy. The report explains that private equity firms want to buy cheap, therefore PE firms buy already-troubled assets, which is why they've got their hands in so many defaulting companies. For turnaround investors like Cerberus and Sun (who each have more than one ringer on this list), perhaps. Keep reading.

Hiring Bob Lipp is one of the best moves Marge Magner’s ever made. At least that’s what she told me this morning in a discussion about Lipp and what LPs think of her firm’s moving parts. Despite (basically) losing her partner and co-founder to the corporate world, Magner and her young firm, Brysam Global Partners, couldn’t be happier. See, Magner and her fellow ex-Citigroup exec Bob Willumstad formed Brysam Global Partners in 2007. They raised a $1 billion private equity fund to invest in consumer facing financial services companies in emerging markets. But in June, Willumstad decided to take on a minor, insignificant extracurricular activity. He became CEO of AIG International. (You may have heard of it, some paltry $49 billion company.) He technically still works for Brysam Global Partners as a Senior Advisor, though the amount of time he commits can’t be much. Naturally, I had a few questions for Magner and Lipp. Follow the jump to read what Brysam’s LPs did when Willumstad left, where the firm sees opportunities, the status of its fund, and a bonus piece of trivia.

How-To Edition: How to keep your investors, how to pretend everything’s OK (Ahem, Blackstone), how to equitize a deal and how to raise prices at a store named “99 Cents Only.” Bloomberg: 99 Cents Only is a no-bullshit dollar store—when they say 99 cents, they mean there is no item over 99 cents in their store. Unlike say, their KKR-backed peers, Dollar General (more like, A Dollar, Generally). But the store’s founders didn’t account for long term headwinds like rising costs and inflation with that philosophy. How to solve it? They’ve raised prices, for the first time since opening in 1981, by a whole penny, to 99.9 cents. Genius. (Via Wall Street Folly.)

Is this surprising? Probably not. Green is such a buzzword these days that I’ve heard a number of people express fears of a backlash. I'm not talking about venture investing, I’m talking about plain, vanilla M&A, where there hasn’t been much of a surge of interest to backlash against! By and large, green M&A is still waiting for its day. A feature from mergermarket reports that the “groundswell of interest” in environmentally friendly building materials and processes has been slow to translate to M&A activity. "Obstacles to M&A could include the generally difficult construction market, a skepticism about the profitability of green products and the difficulty in defining what really counts as green." Aside from the first one, those obstacles apply to most green buyout targets. So how does PE activity fare?

Soap Opera Edition: Desperation, power grabs, money hoarding, name changes, and tired jokes. Reuters: Lehman’s Neuberger sales “smacks of desperation,” an analyst suggests. FT: Meanwhile, the private equity arm of another bank that’s already failed, Bear Stearns, is staying intact, albeit with a new name. Introducing JPMorgan Private Equity.

Once a limited process, the stake sale of apparel maker Tory Burch has been opened to a wider pool of private equity bidders, peHUB has learned. The company’s namesake, Tory Burch, and her ex-husband and business partner, Christopher Burch, had hired Goldman Sachs to shop the business, but disagreements over fees led the duo to move forward with Lehman Brothers as its sell-side adviser. (Goldman was connected to Christopher Burch; Lehman’s connections were with Tory Burch.) Women’s Wear Daily reported in July that bidding for the 30% stake had been narrowed to Bear Stearns Merchant Banking and TSG Consumer Partners, though the sale hinged on the firms’ willingness to pay Tory Burch’s steep asking price.

Instead of focusing on one deal, I’ve briefly covered a handful of the week’s most interesting transactions. After the gushing font of deal activity this week, it was hard to pick just one. After the jump, read about The Flip-Floppers, The Cross Border Challenge, The Redeemer and The Repeat Offender. Plus, an honorable mention.

The unemployed financial engineer who grabbed national media attention after wearing an “MIT Graduate For Hire” sandwich board on Park Avenue remains without a job. In June, Josh Persky’s media stunt was all over the news and it seemed to have worked—he spoke of numerous job interviews and leads on a barrage of talk show appearances in and news articles. By now, you’d think his unconventional job hunting methods—and fame—would have paid off.

Haphazard Edition: No real pattern today, but its bad news all around. Venture is dead, a financial tsunami is a-brewing, why Harvard and Yale have the same benefits as funds of funds, and which airline is the most delayed.