Has Hands lost his touch?

"There is always the next deal," Guy Hands declared today, a fortnight after defeat in his legal fight with Citigroup. He's right in the sense that one of his Terra Firma funds still has €2.4bn to spend. And he may be right in thinking that, if that cash is invested profitably rather than wasted on disastrous deals like EMI, Terra Firma has a future. Mind you, reading his speech in Paris, you have to wonder why investors would wish to throw more cash at anybody in his line of work. "There is an extraordinary overhang of uninvested capital in private equity right now," Hands declared.