If investors in equities and debt markets will remember anything of the first half of 2022 it will be generational sell-offs. But the turmoil in public markets has not yet fully bled into private equity: fundraising has marched on, large deals are still being consummated and paper returns look strong. The blood, however, may be about to flow. Buy-out barbarians made their names in the late 1980s, not the 1970s, for good reason. The corporate buy-out is a financial ploy unsuited to the coming period of slow growth and high inflation; no previous boom-and-bust cycle in private-equity’s 40-year history has been like it. Most important,
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