Steve Bills

The return of covenant-lite does not mean the debtor-friendly terms will trickle down to the middle market, said Joe McGrath, a managing director at Barclays Capital and its head of global leveraged finance. “We haven’t seen a huge shift toward covenant-lite deals” in mid-market transactions, in part because the smaller loans offer less liquidity for […]

A friendly reminder! The deadline is fast approaching for the eleventh annual Deal Of The Year Awards, sponsored by our sister Web site, buyoutsnews.com. If you want to nominate your firm, or somebody out there you know and respect, you have just two weeks left to make yourself known. The deadline for nominations is Friday, […]

Chicago mid-market lender Monroe Capital LLC is adding staff as it prepares to close a new loan fund and to lend more aggressively in 2011. The firm, which has hired six new staffers, including a managing director, is near closing on a new $250 million fund to invest in credit, according to Theodore L. Koenig, […]

Unprecedented low interest rates could boost the LBO business by driving retail money into the kind of mutual funds that invest in leveraged finance. The thought came to mind as I read Bill Gross’s latest commentary on the economy and the markets. The co-CIO of PIMCO is not a happy camper. Gross’s monthly investment commentary, […]

Startup lender NXT Capital LLC may try this summer to float a collateralized loan obligation, taking advantage of a leveraged loan market that continues to strengthen. “It’s our expectation that the market will continue improving this year, with issuers coming back with the expectation of CLOs permanently funding their assets,” said Robert Radway, NXT Capital’s […]

The Treasury Department's guidance on the Volcker Rule, published this week, says regulators can allow banks to offer "feeder funds" for customers to invest in private equity and hedge funds. But it also encourages regulators to eliminate loopholes that banks might try to use to get around restrictions on their direct private equity and hedge fund investments. The 81-page report, released Tuesday by the department's Financial Stability Oversight Council, fulfills a requirement of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which will ultimately be enforced by the Federal Reserve, the FDIC and other federal agencies. The report offers only a general discussion of the Volcker Rule, a provision of the law that bans banks from proprietary trading, as well as from making investments in third-party private equity and hedge funds. Another key requirement of the law: Banks can commit no more than 3 percent of their core, "Tier One" capital, to their own sponsored private equity and hedge funds, nor can they provide more than 3 percent of the commitments to such funds.

Shameless plug: Our sister Web site, buyoutsnews.com, is announcing its eleventh annual Deal Of The Year Awards. The deadline for nominations is Friday, Feb. 25. Buyouts Deal Of The Year Awards, to be published in Buyouts Magazine in the spring, will honor exceptional majority-stake transactions closed in 2010. This year, like the last two, we're focusing the contest on exits, to ensure we are recognizing the industry's most successful transactions over the life cycle of the holding. For complete details, download the pdf.

Castle Creek Capital LLC has wrapped fundraising on its fourth fund, a $331.1 million pool that the firm has earmarked to make non-control investments in troubled community banks. After more than 22 months of fundraising—its first sale was in March 2009—the firm was well short of the $500 target that it reported in a regulatory filing, according to our sister site, Buyouts. Castle Creek, of Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., specializes in recapitalization, growth equity, and buyout investments in U.S.-based community banks with assets of less than $10 billion. It has seven properties in the Fund IV portfolio so far—three publicly traded bank holding companies, three private ones, and a shelf charter for future acquisitions. Buyouts subscribers can read more here.

Interesting, isn't it, how LBO sponsors may put widely varying values on the companies they take private? The New York Times had an interesting exercise in its business section today to compare and contrast the valuations that different buyout firms put on some of their portfolio holdings. One example is the Texas electric utility Energy Future Holdings Corp., owned by buyout firms including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs. The company was taken private in 2007 in a deal valued at $48 billion—the largest in the history of private equity. K.K.R. now values its investment at 20 cents on the dollar; TPG values its stake at twice that, 40 cents. That gap represents a difference of nearly $1.7 billion in the value of each firm’s equity stake. It almost makes you wonder if these sponsors were looking at the same company.

With the new year, so also a new calendar and new needs to fill in those blanks and put some structure to your year. Here are some must-attend buyouts events in the months ahead where the cool kids will be hanging out. To begin with, there are our own Buyouts conferences, sponsored by our sister […]