People who have bought expensive houses on a mortgage, at rising interest rates, will be relieved to experience falling interest rates at last. But at the same time house prices are falling faster than the fall in interest rates, eroding their equity stake - if they had positive equity in the first place. At some point their equity becomes zero turning them purely into tenants of their own propert...

According to The Times: Collapsing house prices are plunging 60,000 homeowners a month into negative equity, which means the country is on course for a worse crisis than the 1990s crash. At current trends, 2m households will enter negative equity by 2010, outstripping the 1.8m affected at the bottom of the last housing slump. Let's check that against the MW Negative-equity-o-meter. Assum...

Rewind almost three years and the trade union movement was embroiled in a bitter media spat with the private equity industry. We were asked to produce the evidence that private equity firms increased risk for the companies they acquired. Well, the evidence is now here.

OT, but how about a running total of the value of "equity" raised in debt-for-equity swaps now that plenty of companies are getting in on the game. Would be useful to know how much taxpayers money ISN'T being wasted on Gordon buying equity.

Private equity firms fear Government plans to raise capital gains tax from 18pc to 40pc could deal a devastating blow to their business model.

Some of Europe's biggest private equity investors have attacked a plan requiring alternative fund managers to register, saying it was likely to push up costs without delivering much benefit

Private equity chiefs scramble to defend their industry's tax advantages after Barack Obama proposed to more than double the tax rate for carried interest, the profit-share that provides much of their income

In an interview with Euractiv, Javier Echarri, Secretary-General of the European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (EVCA), criticised the EU’s proposed directive on alternative investment funds for being flawed and for discriminating against private equity, particularly through its strict disclosure requirements.

NVM alerts me to an article entitled Insolvent Banks: Why a Debt-for-Equity Swap Won't Work. The author has at least used the real life example of Citigroup, which appears to be deeply in the mire. He points out that if assets were written down by 20% (a reasonable guess), not only would all bonds have to be converted to equity, but (1) some ordinary deposits as well, which would of course tr...

John McFall thinks so. Whereas the rest of us know so. We know that we are subsidising several banks. Well, no subsidy without equity, and no equity without control of policy.