At 7am on Monday, Marc Rowan, chief executive of private equity group Apollo Global, took to the stage in Beverly Hills and warned his fellow financiers that a decade of almost uninterrupted buoyancy in financial markets was ending.
“There is more of a correction to come,” said Rowan, whose firm manages $513bn in assets. “We are a long way from means and medians,” he said, referring to equity market valuations. “In the credit market, we also have a long way to go.”
As one prominent dealmaker noted, there are well over a dozen private equity firms trying to close new fundraisings of $15bn or more. At the same time, investors have marked down their public stock holdings drastically and at a far faster rate than their private portfolios, making them more overexposed to buyouts than ever. Apollo recently cautioned that its new private equity fundraising will take longer than previously expected to close.
Read more: FT
