Following up on my previous post, private equity fundraising was down 67 percent (!) in the 4th quarter of 2008 according to Thomson Reuters:
Private equity firms in the United States raised just $15.3 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, according to new data from Thomson Reuters. That amount represents more than a 67 percent drop from the previous quarter, as well as nearly a 75 percent drop from the last quarter of 2007. It is also a small fraction of the amount raised during the boom years.
Private equity investment also sunk:
Private equity invested just $7.6 billion during the turbulent fourth quarter. Compare that with the nearly $250 billion spent in the second quarter of 2007, right before the credit crisis took hold.
On the bright side, because so much money was raised in the first three quarters of 2008 and relatively so little has been invested, there is a lot of money waiting to be spent when the time is right (hopefully sooner rather than later).
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