Erin Griffith

Remember The Weather Channel deal? For $3.5 billion, Bain Capital, Blackstone Group and NBC Universal purchased the media business, with debt from insiders like Bain Capital’s Sankaty Advisors, Blackstone’s GSO Capital, and NBC parent GE Commercial Finance. The partnership with NBC Universal is exemplary of the new age of buyouts—a number of PE firms have […]

***Mark Florian joined First Reserve from UBS. It seems like private equity has an endless supply of jobs for professionals who are disillusioned with or canned from Wall Street. Yes, PE seems like the logical next step for an experienced M&A banker, but there’s not much work to be done in private equity right now […]

Last week, a slew of survey and study data came out, and like a diligent reporter I’m wading through them to bring you the highlights of each. Here goes. Global Scenarios for Private Equity and Venture Capital Commissioned by: The European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association Goal: Examine four potential scenarios for the future […]

***The recent economic upswing was the first economic recovery since the 1960s in which the number of women in the workplace fell. (New York Times) ***I didn’t know poison pills ever went away, and I am not sure how worried companies need to be about warding off ravenous private equity firms dying for a takeover, […]

For our next foray into survey-land, peHub has the goods on a survey taken by our own readers, the ACG-Thomson Reuters Mid-Year 2008 DealMakers Survey. Based on the opinions of more than 500 bankers, PE pros and those providing services to them, TR and ACG came to a few surprising and a few obvious conclusions. […]

Fifth Street Finance Corp.’s IPO (in early June) was the first ever BDC listing for underwriter Goldman Sachs. Furthermore, it’s one of the only financial services company to go public this year. To celebrate this rare move as welll as the firm’s 10 year anniversary, Fifth Street’s president and CEO, Leonard Tannebaum, will ring the […]

***Dealzone highlights the Friday Night Death Watch (much like the bane of an M&A reporter’s existence, the Sunday Night Deal Watch.) But is that image really what a dead bank looks like? ***Ben Stein updates his 1980s introspective on the economics of love. Didn’t realize the lawyer, writer, actor and economist was also a romantic. […]

Today’s column covers last night’s Tax Loophole Protest (in front of KKR’s New York Headquarters), which I peeled myself from my air-conditioned cubicle to attend. The Service Employees International Union has expressed a number of complaints about private equity firms: they aren’t socially responsible, they deplete a company’s cash reserves, and they take on too […]

***Quiz: Which republican Secretary of Treasury publicly stated that tax-deductible interest is all a buyout has going for it? (Answer below.) ***VC bloggers are lamenting the rise of corporate-backed blogs as they contemplate corporate or institutional backing themselves. What? One of them even uses the phrase “Blog War.” I know VCs are way ahead of […]

Today SEIU rallied in front of KKR’s New York headquarters and across the world to “Take Back Our Economy” and “End KKR Greed” which, they argued, involves taxing carried interest as ordinary income rather than as capital gains. I’ll have more on this in my column tomorrow morning, but to tide you over, here are […]