The best private equity deal to ever fall apart

    These days, though, the credit markets have improved, at least enough for deals to pick up and get larger. "There is more credit available for leveraged acquisitions than I would have expected even 6 months ago," Coulter says. "It is more expensive and less available than it was in 2007, but because the prices of companies are lower, transactions can be very attractive."

    Jessica Canning, Global Research Director at Dow Jones Private Markets, says that in the first quarter of this year there have been 123 private equity deals announced, compared with 76 in the first quarter last year. Deals this year, according to data from Pitchbook, include the $5.2 billion dollar TPG and CCP Investment Board takeover of IMS Health announced this past November, the $3.4 billion dollar Silver Lake and Warburg Pinkus takeover of Interactive Data Corporation (IDC) announced this month, and the $1.6 billion Bain takeover in April of a unit of Dow Chemical (DOW, Fortune 500). "It does look like there is some traction in the buyout space right now," Dow Jones' Canning says, adding "we are starting to claw back to pre-crisis levels."

    There are, of course, still hurdles to recovery. For one thing, the specter of a metastasizing European debt crisis remains a big concern. And getting credit, though looser, still remains an issue. Even if banks are starting to unfreeze lending, credit isn't as ample as it was at the boom's height, limiting the size and frequency of deals. "Back in the '06-'07 timeframe, credit was relatively easy to obtain. The rates were very low," says KPMG's Hessing. "It's not where it was then, so in this respect, credit is still an issue. There's a lot of talk about [interest] rates going up. The terms are more restrictive than they were."

FinReg questions loom

    And then, of course, there's increased government regulation - something PE kings are keeping a particularly close eye on as Congress starts talking about a so-called "carried interest tax," a proposal to tax private equity and hedge fund profits as income, rather than capital gains (hiking the rate on these sorts of returns by about 20 percentage points). With the Senate's passage of financial reform last week, and the Obama Administration attempting to stage manage reconciliation with the eventual House bill, the effects of reform on PE are still somewhat unclear, but will soon come into sharper focus.

    Even so, as the financing for deals slowly but surely starts to unfreeze, a tentative optimism is taking hold in the buyout space. The next $15 billion buyout offer to hit a boardroom table might be the one that gets accepted. "I guess," Coulter said, "looking at the progress in the industry over the last year, I can't help but think of that Mark Twain quote - 'reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.'"