Warren Buffett has it, Adrian MacKenzie doesn't - a sense of timing that is. Buffett, who has been steadily buying up businesses as the financial malaise has grown deeper, yesterday took a multi-billion dollar plunge into a Wall Street giant that has been brought to its knees.
MacKenzie, meantime, is desperately scrambling for survival after a multi-billion dollar plunge into Australian television at the height of the private equity madness last year.
The knives are being sharpened at the headquarters of the old Packer media empire, these days 75 per cent controlled by the private equity outfit CVC Asia Pacific, which the youthful MacKenzie runs.
The grating sound of metal on metal lifted a notch last week when the head of magazines, Scott Lorson, found his job no longer existed.
It became ear-splittingly loud this week when MacKenzie was replaced as PBL Media chairman by an Englishman with terrific experience in helping debt-ridden African economies out of a hole.
With a September 30 deadline looming on debt covenant negotiations with its bankers, it is clear that PBL Media is entering a critical phase. Traditional media in all its forms - print and broadcast - is facing a crisis as ad revenues are leached to the internet.
Combine those problems with a slowing economy and an unsustainable debt burden, and you have a recipe for … well, let's just say it's not a pretty sight.
PBL Media is saddled with $4.2 billion in debt.
It earned just $463 million before interest and tax last financial year.
That's barely enough to cover the interest bill, let alone repay any principal, and no amount of management reshuffling or cost-cutting will alter that.
But how to escape? There are no buyers at the moment, no financing and certainly no one willing to pick up the business at anywhere near the sort of price paid to James Packer.
A sale at this point would crystallise an enormous loss.
It is conceivable that Packer, who still has his foot on 25 per cent of PBL through his Consolidated Media Holdings, could resume control of the beleaguered Nine network, just as his father did after Alan Bond's short-lived adventure as a media mogul in the late 1980s.
It is just one example of the folly in which private equity groups
engaged in the past few years when debt was cheap and they were frantically bidding up the price of assets around the globe.
Kerry Stokes pulled off a similar deal, hoodwinking the granddaddy of private equity groups, KKR, when he sold half his Seven Network. The Canadian Asper family, who control Ten, probably wish they'd done the same thing.
The only reason we know so much about CVC's position with the Nine Network is because it only owns 75 per cent of the business.
Bear in mind there are hundreds of billions and possibly more than a trillion dollars worth of risky debt associated with private equity takeovers that has not been aired because those businesses no longer report earnings to the public.
But their bankers are only too aware of the parlous financial position in which many of these businesses now find themselves - overloaded with debt and facing a recession.
Luckily, Australian banks largely steered clear of financing private equity takeovers as they considered them too risky.
Most of those loans reside with American and European banks and are likely to surface within the next year and then out until 2011. That will add further pressure to asset prices and underperforming loans and possibly force another crisis among major lending institutions.
Had those private equity groups waited for the inevitable downturn - and you didn't have to be a genius last year to recognise the madness that had infected the sharemarket - the current environment would be a verdant field just ripe for the ploughing.
One man who has waited is the veteran American investor Warren Buffett, whose mantra has always been: be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful.
For more than two years he has railed against the profligate habits of his Wall Street counterparts. Yesterday he eked out his revenge with a $US5 billion ($5.9 billion) plunge into Goldman Sachs and a deal to invest another $US5 billion at a vast discount to the current battered price at any time in the next five years.
