Yesterday, we reported about private equity's laments [2]that even with ZIRP there are no longer any bargains available in the US (which is why, naturally, the PE industry is now actively selling) with EV/EBITDA multiples north of the traditional 8x borderline benchmark level. Sure enough, as can be seen below, this is indeed the case as the US is now overpriced even for those who have direct access to the Fed's near zero-cost debt funding.
So where are PE firms looking next (if anywhere, assuming they aren't spending their time selling "anything that isn't nailed down" which as we know from Leon Black's presentation from April [3]is precisely what they are doing)? The following heatmap of global aggregate Enterprise Value/EBITDA will hopefully put things in their proper, highly overvalued, perspective.
What about some other valuation metric heatmaps? Here is plain vanilla P/E (although the number for the US looks deceptively 2017E forward looking):
And here is P/BV:
Finally, those curious what all of the above would look like not pro forma for the global central banks' balance sheet at record size, and valuations of all asset classes artifically supported by Bernanke et cie. (i.e., in the biggest asset bubble ever created), will just have to wait. Of course, when said data does finally come out, instead of heatmap, it will be far more accurately titled an "icemap."
h/t @guru25i [4] [4]