News
The Fed's hawkish pivot reframes the entire 2026 PE thesis. Kevin Warsh's debut FOMC meeting on June 17. Rates held at 3.50-3.75% but nine of 18 officials now project at least one hike this year. Median dot moved from 3.4% to 3.
Deals
Energy Fuels acquires VAC from Ara Partners for $1.9bn. Rare earth magnets. Mine-to-magnet platform. 100+ years of production expertise, 400+ patents, 1,000+ customers. Ara Partners, a PE firm specialising in industrial decarbonisation, bought VAC in 2023 and is exiting to a public buyer. Ara will own
Toolkit
Operating partners have gone from a nice-to-have to a line item LPs ask about. But "bring in an operator" is easy to say and expensive to get wrong: the wrong hire, the wrong remit, or the wrong reporting line can burn a year of a hold
Views
Which is inconvenient, because tech people prefer their operators to arrive wearing Allbirds and saying things like “community.” Bending Spoons buys the stuff everyone thinks has had its day. Evernote. WeTransfer. Vimeo. Eventbrite. AOL. Brightcove. Meetup. Old brands. Real users. Tired products. Pricing that probably needed adult supervision years ago.
Views
Same job title. Same office. Same “thrilled to share” LinkedIn announcement that reads like it was typed at gunpoint. Completely different job. The numbers are fairly brutal. CEOs at public companies average about 7 years in the seat. In PE-backed portfolio companies, it is closer to 3. CFOs drop
Views
The industry calls it dry powder, because apparently “we raised too much money at the top of the market and now can’t find enough deals that clear the math” was a bit long for the annual meeting. Bain says roughly a quarter of that capital has been sitting for
Views
Private equity, naturally, has taken that as an invitation. The 15 biggest take-privates announced since 2023 add up to $217B of enterprise value. EA at $55B. Endeavor at $25B. Walgreens at $23.7B. Hologic, Toshiba, Adevinta, Sealed Air, Subway and the rest of the “apparently misunderstood by public investors”
Views
Every private equity firm now has a digital transformation story. Sounds impressive. Looks good in the deck. Gives everyone something modern to say in the annual meeting. What it often means in reality is this: They bought Salesforce. Nobody uses it. Or they bought HubSpot. Or a BI tool. Or
Life
Logitech made a mouse that folds flat enough to fit in a shirt pocket. The Mobi Fold. Transforms from something the size of a credit card into a full wireless mouse. Compatible with everything. Reduces trackpad strain by 22%. The kind of gadget that makes you wonder why nobody did
News
The American Prospect publishes "Nothing Is Safe From Private Equity Rollups." PE consolidation of fire truck manufacturers. Prices doubled since 2020. Wait times from 18 months to four and a half years. Departments keeping unsafe apparatus in service. REV Group told Wall Street it was an "Experienced
Deals
LongRange Capital acquires Pizza Hut from Yum! Brands for approximately $1.5bn. Nearly 20,000 restaurants. $75m earnout by 2030. The only Yum! division posting operating profit declines. Consumer PE dealmaking down for five consecutive quarters. LongRange is going the other way. YAHOO FINANCE
Views
The market may be waiting for private equity to get better. Bain’s latest midyear report is not exactly bedtime reading for anyone hoping the old model is coming back. Deal activity is still sluggish. Exits are stuck. Fundraising is uninspiring. Distributions remain well below historical norms. The implied capital