New third-quarter numbers from PitchBook give US private equity another quarter it would rather not talk about. Deal value fell 13.6 percent year over year, exit value fell 14.1 percent, and the firms doing the deals are managing more than 3 trillion dollars in assets while finding fewer places to actually put new money to work or cash old bets out.
A slowdown that keeps getting called, and keeps not ending
PitchBook analyst Kyle Walters put a name to the pattern rather than just the number: the industry has spent several years now predicting the turn is just ahead, and the turn keeps slipping. You hear it every year now, he said, describing a cycle of forecasts that assume recovery is close and then get pushed another few quarters down the road. The firm's own asset growth numbers back up how much the picture has changed, with annual AUM growth running at roughly 6 percent now, about half the 12 percent pace the industry got used to in better years.
Why exits are the real chokepoint
The deal value drop gets the headline, but the exit value drop is arguably doing more damage underneath it. When general partners can't sell portfolio companies or take them public at the pace they'd like, they can't return cash to the limited partners who fund the next round, and that backs up the entire pipeline. Fundraising has gotten noticeably harder over the past year and a half to two years as a direct result, concentrating successful closes among a smaller group of managers who can still show LPs a credible path to liquidity.
