The once booming business of private equity faces an uncertain future. What’s not uncertain, however, is that many private equity deals are imploding from the weight of leveraged debt and greed. Inevitable bankruptcies will result in higher unemployment and a deeper recession.

Private equity is an asset class consisting of equity securities in operating companies that are not publicly traded.  The name “private equity”is the rechristened, kinder and more gentile label for what used to be known as leveraged buyouts, or LBOs. But make no mistake about it, while leverage may not be part of the name any more, it remains a big part of every private equity deal.

LBO firms, or “franchises”, as Henry Kravis, co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), likes to call his shop, acquire publicly traded operating companies. Then they streamline management and operations to increase profitability and hope to cash out through a merger, an outright sale of the company, or by taking the company public again through an initial public offering, or IPO.

Private equity firms are the debutante sisters of hedge funds. They raise huge pools of capital from pension funds, endowment funds, sovereign wealth funds, institutional investors and wealthy entrepreneurs. But while hedge funds buy and sell the stocks of companies they hope to profit from, private equity shops buy whole companies.

Generally, once a target is identified, an offer is made to buy a majority, or all of the stock of the company. The trick of the deal is to pay for the target by using as little equity capital as possible, and raising the remainder by actually having the target company borrow the required funds. Except for the private equity firm’s initial equity investment, the target company is essentially buying itself.

And if that isn’t enough of a trick, very often when the target is privatized, their new masters have the company borrow even more money so they can then pay themselves a dividend as a bonus for the good job they did in leveraging the company to the hilt so they can streamline it.

The leveraged buyout business has been around for a long time and it has worked very well for investors and the private investment bankers who make an extravagant living with other people’s money. In fact, the business was so successful it eventually led to its now very problematic fork in the road. The problem facing private equity is that their leveraged deals were at one time in such great demand that it became too easy to borrow too much money.

The result was that they chased too many deals, paid too much for targets, paid themselves too many dividends and fees, and now their portfolio companies are straining and collapsing under the weight of too much debt.

Act I: The Two Big Mistakes that Made Leveraging Possible

There are two elements that made massive borrowing possible.

The first was a ready supply of capital courtesy of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s easy money policy and low interest rates. The second was the ability of banks that lend money to acquired companies to pool those loans into securities called  collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs, and sell them off to investors. Banks and investors refer to this asset class as “leveraged loans.”

Since banks were able to sell off their leverage loans to investors they had plenty of recycled money to lend out again and again. Competition to lend out all that money put borrowers in an advantageous position, which they exploited.

Banks and non-bank lenders attach covenants to the loans they make. Typically, covenants dictate to borrowers what specific balance sheet requirements must be met and include debt-to-cash flow leverage ratios, limitations on the total amount of debt a company can carry, minimum equity provisions and other dictates that serve to secure collateral that is relied upon by lenders.

But, banks were so flush with money and so eager to lend that privately acquired companies, driven by their new private equity masters, proposed that the money they borrowed should not be encumbered by the protective covenants lenders are used to demanding. Hence the birth of “covenant-lite” loans.

Covenant-lite loans included insane “reverse covenants” that benefited the borrowers not the lenders.