It will all be over by Christmas. At least, that is what the banks financing the leveraged buy-out of BCE – at C$52bn, the largest ever – are hoping. In exchange for agreeing to stump up the money, the banks have, among other concessions, pushed the final closing date back to December 11.

The hope is that credit markets will have thawed somewhat by midwinter. Understandably, the Canadian telecom giant’s stock leapt on the news. Elsewhere, investors were also cheered by the buy-out of Weather Channel.

But if this marks the return of the LBO, it is a curiously muted one. BCE has done very well to pull its deal back from the brink. However, the banks’ stay of execution does little for the leveraged loan market overall. With outstanding, unsold commitments standing at $60bn, according to Standard & Poor’s LCD, a more helpful outcome might actually have been the deal’s collapse, since that would have reduced the backlog by another quarter.

In terms of new deals, the Weather Channel buy-out illustrates how much the world has changed in a year. Its enterprise value of $3.2bn makes it the second-largest US LBO so far this year, according to Dealogic. But that is well below the original asking price, and tiny compared with 2007’s mega-deals. More than half of the funding is equity. Wall Street’s banks are, by and large, conspicuous by their absence – unlike the days when they fell over themselves to offer credit in exchange for advisory fees.

Spreads in the secondary market have widened again in the past month, offering little relief to dealmakers. Alongside last week’s agreement to kill the Penn National Gaming buy-out, in return for cash from the retreating buyers and  banks, the latest news signifies a continuing process of dealing with the excesses of the past, rather than a turning point.