Scouring today's soggy leveraged-buy-out landscape, it seems faintly ridiculous that as recently as June bankers were waiting with bated breath for the first $100 billion deal. In a matter of weeks the private-equity boom has been strangled, its oxygen—cheap debt—cut off by the credit crisis. Shares in Blackstone, which led the boom, languish some 20% below the price at which they were sold to the public in June. The volume of buy-outs has shrunk (see chart).
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