Not joking. I used to work at United Defense, and the Carlyle Group sold us BAE to buy Dunkin Donuts, at DFA meetings, I’d introduce myself, and say, “I work for the Carlyle Group”, just to see the double takes.

It now appears that the
Carlyle Capital Corp. division has defaulted on about $21 billion in loans.

They invested in “high quality” mortgage backed securities from the GSEs (Fannie and Freddie), but they have not been able to sell them in order to pay some notes coming due.

Not surprising. $21.7 billion backed by $670 million in equity is a 32.3:1 leverage, which means that if things tend down about 3%, you are broke.