As leveraged buy-outs go, the recently announced $33bn deal to buy HCA, the US hospitals group, is rated the biggest ever. Now, NTL, the heavily indebted European cable group, looks set to go the same way for an eye-popping $20bn. With private equity investors gobbling up bigger and bigger chunks of the corporate world, fuddy-duddies worry that quoted equity will shortly become extinct. The usual party-poopers see a bubble and warn that hubris will soon lead to nemesis. For them, over-ambitious private equity folk deserve their status, shared with hedge funds, as the new bogeymen of the western world.
COLUMNISTS
