VIDEO: In PE World, Is $5 Billion the New $30 Billion?

Bigger and bolder buyouts are indeed likely to materialize, but three senior PE executives told Reuters Insider not to look out for any multibillion dollar megadeals anytime soon.

Garrett Moran, Blackstone’s chief operating officer, John Coyle, a partner at Permira, and Steve Zide, managing director at Bain Capital, discussed the deal landscape with Reuters Insider’s Jen Rogers.

In the discussion, they answered some key questions:

With so much cash committed to PE firms and on corporate balance sheets, is there a bidding war on the horizon between strategics and the private equity industry?

And will takeover targets soon be lining up to sell their firms at the prices that PE firms expect?

And finally, were the huge deals we saw in 2005 and 2006 an anomaly, and what kinds of deals now qualify as “big deals” these days anyway?