When private equity bosses met at the SuperReturn conference in Berlin earlier this summer, the mood was downcast, as the assembled executives mulled the end of a decade of steady growth for the industry.

As inflation and interest rates rise while growth slows, the era of cheap debt that financed the buyouts of recent years looks set to be drawing to a close. Some now fear that the investment banks which underwrote buyout debt at high prices could be among the first to get their fingers burnt during the coming period of widely-expected stagflation as they struggle to offload debt to investors.