The Private Equity Bust

The Deal.com is taking me to task over a column I wrote for Bloomberg yesterday about private equity. They miss a few points, however. It doesn't matter if the firms themselves are not highly leveraged: the businesses they own certainly are. Next, they seem to think they are "the least of the economy's problems". But in the UK for example private equity controlled companies employ millions of people and the same is true in the US. If they start to go under, isn't that a problem?