Does This Mean Equity Private is Back?

A long time ago, in a blogosphere far, far away (2008) – before there was TRB or Zero Hedge and when the Business Insider was still a page on Silicon Alley Insider called Clusterstock, there was a legendary pseudonymous blogger named Equity Private.  And Equity Private was one of the twin pillars holding up Dealbreaker (the other being Bess Levin).

EP (as we called her) was clearly an industry insider and had a razor sharp wit.  Dealbreaker was probably the most important site to be following during the credit crisis; it acted as a running tally of all the lies, denials, turnabouts and scuttlebutting as the largest financial institutions in the world found themselves backing into bankruptcy one falsehood at a time.

But time marched on and we eventually lost EP to the wilderness of Zero Hedge.  She changed her moniker to Marla Singer (Tyler Durden’s love interest from Fight Club) and, I suppose, went through her dark period over in the land of bags over heads and “survival rates at zero”.

And when that got old, she seemed to have quietly scaled back the blogging, sporadically posting at her home base, Finem Respice, as Equity Private once again.

Two years have passed since she left the Marla character.  As evidence of her talent as a blogger, it took Dealbreaker almost this entire time to find another counterpart who could even hold a candle to Bess (which I believe they now have in Matt Levine).  Bloggers are common in finance – good bloggers are incredibly rare.

Muffie Benson-Perella

But fresh evidence has surfaced that EP may be ready to return to form and bring back the snark and stinging insights once again – you see, EP had another alter ego while writing for Dealbreaker, a hilarious character named Muffie Benson-Perella.  Muffie was EP’s satirical device and it worked to hilarious effect.  Picture the most self-absorbed, entitled girl from your high school somehow paying/flirting her way into Harvard B-School followed by a role at a Wall Street i-bank that was way over her capabilities.  Then picture her talking down to everyone around her with a straight face.  That’s Muffie, and it rules.

Anyway, Muffie just resurfaced with her own site this past week (The Pink Sheets – perfect!) and the first post is simple yet biting – Muffie offering a research paper containing her view of the Greek situation, of course.  I don’t know if this means we get EP back to doing market / finance stuff full time, but if this is a harbinger of that, you are all in for a very big treat.

Check this out:

The Pink Sheets

The Muffie Archives at Dealbreaker

The Equity Private Archives at Dealbreaker