Corporate Watch

For private equity firms nothing is more important than being able to raise large amount of cash quickly, but as a result of the credit market crisises it looks like the days of cheap credit could be well and truly over. Blackstone announced today that it had failed to raise $1.88 billion (a tiny amount by private equity standards) in order to purchase PHH, a mortgage lender, in a joint deal with General Electric.

Blackstone has long been held up as one of the successes of the private equity market, and was said to be reassessing its position.

Its interesting, Blackstone (NYSE: BX) one of the worlds largest private equity companies, worth over $80 billion, doesnt contribute a single thing to good causes.

When it first filed its IPO Blackstone went about setting up the Blackstone Foundation, a charitable enterprise that the company promised would do good. However, the Blackstone Foundation hasnt recieved a penny from its parent company.

And while companies like Microsoft and IBM go about doing good via their foundations, the Blackstone Foundation appears to be nothing more than a PR exercise.