The benefit of operating behind closed doors is the privilege of weeping alone when it all goes wrong. Private equity houses do not have to mark investments to market prices as banks must. But with $906bn worth of buy-outs in the US between 2005-07, and a further $565bn in Europe, according to Dealogic, lenders must eventually be faced.

Consider Freescale and NXP, the chip makers. Piling debt on to companies in a notoriously cyclical industry was always a sign of buy-out boom hubris. Yet in 2006 a Kohlberg Kravis Roberts-led consortium bought Philips’s semiconductor unit NXP for an enterprise value of $8bn, and Blackstone led the $19bn purchase of Freescale from Motorola. Last week, NXP completed a debt exchange on the second attempt, swapping old debt with a face value of $504m for $210m in new notes. Freescale cut its debt total by $2bn in a March refinancing.