Big leveraged buyouts won't return for at least a year because the complex structured products and investors that supported such deals have disappeared, said Thomas H. Lee, president of private-equity firm Lee Equity Partners LLC, at a conference on Tuesday.

Still, there's plenty of money for medium-sized buyouts, partly because loans used to pay for such acquisitions are usually kept on firms' balance sheets and not securitized, Lee said in speech at an Institutional Investor conference in San Francisco...

... Lee also said now may be a good time to begin investing again, noting that his biggest personal investing mistakes came from not putting money into the market after huge dislocations, such as the dot-com bust of 2001 and 2002.
Lee Equity Partners makes private-equity investments usually in growth companies worth between $500 million and $3 billion.

The U.S. is probably in a recession now because banks aren't lending and consumers aren't spending as much, Lee noted.

"We know we're going to come out of it," he said. "Let's start investing soon. That's when to do it -- when you're scared."