Steve Bills

It has been a tough couple of weeks for Goldman Sachs alumni. On Monday, MF Global -- a global commodities and derivatives brokerage launched by onetime Goldman CEO Jon Corzine -- descended into bankruptcy as clients fled the firm's bets on risky European debt. That came just five days after Rajat Gupta, a former Goldman board member, was indicted for his alleged role in Raj Rajaratnam's insider trading conspiracy. But Corzine and Gupta aren't the only Goldman alums to have been brought low ...

Amalgamated Bank has begun to go to market with a unified financing program for buyout sponsors that includes both cash flow lending and asset-based loans, the New York labor bank plans to announce on Tuesday. “Now I feel confident we have the underwriting and the account management capability” to serve both groups of borrowers, Robert […]

The latest regulatory requirement for buyout shops appears not to be as onerous as the industry had feared, lawyers who work with private equity firms told sister publication Buyouts Thursday. Smaller registered private equity firms will be required to provide only limited information regarding size, leverage, investor types and concentration, liquidity, and fund performance. For […]

I don't get Groupon Inc., the "daily deal" company. I even subscribed to its daily e-mails for a while, for about 10 days, getting great bargains I'm sure on products and services that I had absolutely no interest in. So I unsubscribed, seeing no need to litter my in-box voluntarily with e-junk like that.

Mid-market purchase price multiples continued to expand in the third quarter, to 8.9x, according to sister publication Buyouts, which cited a report from Standard & Poor’s Leveraged Commentary and Data. Counting fees and expenses, the total expense of doing deals was 9.2x, the data showed. That was up from the second quarter multiple of 7.9x […]

There was, to use the word of the decade, a sense of bifurcation Wednesday evening during a discussion of credit conditions. Michael Cerminaro, a partner at the private equity firm Sound Harbor Partners, opened the event, sponsored by the business group ACG New York, with a discussion of the eurozone crisis, the risk of a […]

I admit it; I'm a stock market junkie and have been for years. Just watching the feverline move (and MarketWatch has a nice one that continuously updates), you can feel the adrenaline in the market, up or down. It has been an exciting time lately, too. Since the start of July, there have been at least a dozen days when the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved by more than 400 points intraday. Not surprisingly, the most volatile days—including two when the day's range was more than 600 points—were during that crazy ...

Don’t expect a couple of recent big investments of private money into the banking industry to signal a resurgence of dealmaking in the sector, market watchers say. A pair of buyout funds, WL Ross & Co. LLC and The Yucaipa Companies, have made commitments to invest $50 million apiece in Amalgamated Bank, a $4.4 billion […]

CapitalSource Inc., a specialized finance company, is bouncing back to provide a wider variety of leveraged finance. The Chevy Chase, Md.-based lender is increasing its emphasis on loans to sponsor-backed companies, Ryan Golding, the managing director of CapitalSource Leveraged Finance Group, told sister publication Buyouts magazine. He estimated leveraged finance would represent a third of […]

UPDATE: We have a winner. One of our perceptive readers wrote in Oswald Gruebel, CEO of UBS, as the most likely next candidate to be shown the door. Indeed, Gruebel resigned on Saturday in the wake of a $2.3 billion trading scandal. The black crepe watch continues for the other candidates on our list. Our earlier post: Most […]