It had to stop sometime. As was the case with the dot-com bubble, and before that the junk bond craze, the collapse of the private equity boom made sense, was expected, and even seemed overdue-but somehow it still came as a jolt.
- KKR Team: Simpson Thacher & Bartlett
Easy, cheap debt had fueled the private equity engine. Its end, in mid-2007, meant a seismic shift for leveraged buyout specialists. Foremost among them is Simpson Thacher, the top-ranking firm on our private equity charts. Last year the firm advised KKR & Co. L.P. on five domestic deals valued by Thomson Financial at a total of $89 billion-buyouts of TXU Corporation, First Data Corporation, Dollar General Corporation, Laureate Education, Inc., and U.S. Foodservice, Inc.
