Private equity: pecuniary logic and enterprise restructuring

Andrew Cornford, research fellow, Financial Markets Center and Anthony Travis, partner, Gainsbury & Consorts

Long ignored outside the financial sector, private equity is now attracting widespread attention. This has been fanned by recent news items concerning some particularly large takeovers by private equity firms and the enormous income and capital gains which can accrue to their managers and principal shareholders, and which enable lifestyles recalling the earlier gilded age of the late nineteenth-century US.