The media spared no effort to publicize Blackstone’s “losses” in the first quarter of 2008. By now you’ve all seen the numbers and heard all kinds of crazy criticisms. Was our report too slick? Were we trying to mimic the film ‘Reservoir Dogs’ in our partner photo? No! Of course not! The Blackstone Group would never fumble a diamond heist that badly, or hide out in a seedy warehouse. [And another thing: Spoiler alert: all the main characters in Reservoir Dogs get killed].

All this silly nonsense misses the entire point of private equity investing: losses now mean even greater wealth later! So from any sophisticated investors point of view, a first-quarter loss only means you’re going to make that much more money later. That’s what they call the “J curve” and our J curve means Justification and Just Wait and See.

For every $1 million we lose, we expect to reap $1 billion in returns at a later date. That’s what I call The Blackstone Bump, or, The Steve Effect. So that means our first quarter “loss” is actually great news!  People that know things about business and the economy will want to buy our stock and invest in our funds.

In fact, it’s such good news that we’ve decided to celebrate with great bargains on some of our homes, yachts and Deutsche Telekom stock. Visit our offices this weekend for our celebratory office sale; we’ve got a lot of good news to prepare for.