Private equity is sitting on a mountain of capital but struggling to deploy it wisely. Per an article in the Financial Times, buyout firms are investing dry powder at the slowest pace since the Great Recession.
Private equity firms have gone from using more than 5 per cent of their capital, quarter on quarter, at the height of the boom years in 2006, to utilising about 1 per cent in the last three months of 2017, an analysis of figures from 1,000 institutional Investors reveals.
I would be interested in seeing how this data skews across funds by scale. I imagine this is more severe in the megafund category where opportunities available are better known by all participants making competition more aggressive (just an opinion).