These have now all been nationalised: not in the sense that they are part of government, rather, that we now seem to have one national systemofequity capital allocation.
What happens to private equity may be a leading indicator of how the crisis in the financial system will affect the rest of the business world, both because private-equity deals are so dependent on large amounts of debt, and because many of the shrewdest judges of corporate value work for private-equity funds.