No.
Grasping 'Radical' Economic ChangeOctober 10, 2008
Eventually, Rubenstein says, he suspects "once in a lifetime" buying opportunities will come of this crisis.
...
The leaders in our government today, and the leaders of the business world today, do not really have a clear understanding of what needs to be done. I'm not sure anybody does. Everything that has been thought of has been tried and it hasn't yet worked. I do think that at some point we will hit a bottom and people will say this is as far down as the markets should go. The problem is that by the time we hit that bottom, it may well be that many companies do not survive, that unemployment has gone up much higher than people can tolerate, that the credit system is not fatally but near-fatally wounded, and the entire economic construct under which the globe has conducted itself has to be radically changed. Nobody has ever anticipated something like this, nobody has ever seen anything like this, and it's therefore taxing everybody's abilities to find out what the solution is.
I'm hesitant to be a bearer of bad news, but I'm afraid that some of the things we're talking about today-stock declines, credit crunches, things like that-are just the tip of the iceberg. We haven't yet seen the declines in commercial real estate, the rising unemployment, the credit card defaults, the student loan defaults or inability to fund student loans, and the general decline in business sales and consumer activity. All of those things combined will have a very devastating impact, not only on our economy but also [on] the global economy. It's clear now that the concept that some had proposed, that there is a decoupling of the U.S. economy from the rest of the world's, is just not the case. It's clear that the U.S. economy drives the world economy, and we're going to see downturns essentially all around the world.
…
Private equity firms are in an enviable position because most of us are privately held. We have a fair amount of capital available to us, and therefore we have the ability to invest at probably what will be historically low prices.
…
I wish I could say I saw the bottom. We're closer to the bottom than we've been in the past. But I think before we actually hit the bottom there will be some major bankruptcies and some enormous further losses of money.
…
But if I can buy something at one time or two times cash flow, I probably don't need any leverage. So what you'll see is private equity firms buying things at much, much reduced prices, in which case they'll need less leverage to get the returns they want.
…
third, they'll invest much more outside the United States in emerging markets. While those countries have problems as well, the prices are still much cheaper there than they are in the United States.