Will a marriage occur between General Motors (NYSE: GM) and Chrysler? According to industry scuttlebutt, talks have been going on for several weeks, but have been held up partially because of the credit crunch. Today in the Wall Street Journal, a source familiar with the talks reported that talks were proceeding at a "measured pace" and that Cerberus, the private equity firm that owns Chrysler, would want to breathe "fresh air" into the management team of the combined company.

The only member of the two current management teams who could possibly be considered "fresh air" would be Robert Nardelli, much-maligned former CEO of Home Depot and now-chief of Chrysler. He's been in the spot for a little over a year, the sum total of his auto experience. The two most likely candidates to head the combined entity at GM, CEO Rick Wagoner and COO Fritz Henderson, have each been with GM for decades (Henderson was even born in Detroit) and can hardly be considered new blood.

Bringing an outsider into a merged company would certainly create change, though it's hard to know who Cerberus has in mind. The firm's own staff is filled with onetime Fortune 500 executives, including former Johnson & Johnson COO Jim Lenehan and former MCI president and COO Tim Price. My money's on Price, who worked actively on the GMAC deal and thus has deep experience with the industry. Who else could Cerberus be considering for this historic amalgamation of American autos?

This post is part of our Money Face-Offs feature. Let us know who you think comes out ahead in this head-to-head match-up, and check out our other Money Face-Off posts.

Stephen A. Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone Group vs. Henry Kravis, co-founder of KKR. A showdown so delicious, it's already been immortalized on Page Six -- Schwarzman calls Kravis a "one-trick pony," Kravis calls Schwarzman "the poster boy for greed." Who is more arrogant? More eccentric? Richer? Only the planners of their lavish parties can tell ...

The two have been in a high-stakes tennis match of sorts for years in every financially-oriented aspect of their lives, starting with the companies they target, continuing through their more personal acquisitions and not even ending in their contributions to charity.

Nope. In the world of private equity, KKR had always been the hugest, the most storied, the most secret and powerful. KKR was responsible for the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, inspiration for thousands of MBAs, as well as a book and a movie. Not many financial deals have inspired so much as a little sonnet, but this, this was the stuff of legend.

Part of that legend? Kravis' formidable ego.

In the world of individual investors, "Blackstone IPO" is a phrase that ranks right up there with "Amanda Beard photos" in overall sexiness and mystery. Will it be everything that we hope? we wonder, and the fact is, it probably won't. The IPO is due to price today after the market closes, and will start trading tomorrow under the symbol "BX" on the NYSE.

The thing that is problematic, as Peter Cohan has pointed out, is that the term "monetization" weighs heavier (and, for us, far, far less sexy) on the company's prospects than anything. The fact is: the firm isn't forecasted to make a profit for years so it can pay off its partners, for instance, chief despot and CEO Steve Schwarzman. Not just that, but individual investors will be subject to a variety of strange tax impacts, including the rather less-than-detailed reporting the company plans to issue and the possibility that legislation might create adverse tax consequences for the little guy.

It's funny, too, that Schwarzman called the public markets overrated, and mentioned that rival Kohlberg Kravis Roberts had "destroyed the market" for anyone else. I guess, in a few moments, we'll see. The IPO priced at $31 per share, the top end of the range expected and setting Blackstone's valuation at $33.6 billion.

Mega-trendy retailer Limited Brands (NYSE: LTD) announced the sale today of its Express Stores unit to private equity firm Golden Gate Capital, and in the same breath said it was evaluating the options for its Limited Stores segment -- the brand the company derives its name from. Despite the surface inscrutability of this decision (why sell the company's titular brands, the ones that are growing in gross profit while the company's other units are slipping bigtime?), it's one that analysts have been predicting for a while given that CEO Leslie Wexner has been hyping his Victoria's Secret unit as a "megabrand" upon which Limited's future prospects would hinge. Both Victoria's Secret and soap-and-lotion retailer Bath & Body Works, he insists, depend on products whose sales are more predictable than those of clothing.

While that's certainly true, it's also true that the profit margins for the cheap, trendy clothing sold by the company's Express and Limited stores are growing while the rest of the company's brands are falling. Today the company announced that it is revising its outlook for Q1 2007 downward significantly due to poorer-than-expected sales and merchandise margins at Victoria's Secret. After slashing the outlook from 25-28 cents a share to 12-14 cents a share, the stock was down significantly, $1.23 or 4.5% to $26.18, although after-market trading shows some nice recovery.

Perhaps the prediction isn't so easy, but the fact remains that the profit margins and same-store sales growth is a lot better on lemongrass- and magnolia-scented lotion than tank tops and skinny jeans. While Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works regularly record operating profit in the 20-30% range, a good quarter for Express and Limited stores hovers between 5% and 6%. Lingerie is sexy, and soap is way, way sexier -- and Limited Brands has picked this clean, sweet-smelling horse to ride for now.

As of February 3, 2007, Limited had 658 Express stores and 260 Limited stores; 1,326 stores in the Victoria's Secret unit (which includes the La Senza brand); and 1,546 Bath & Body Works stores.

We at BloggingStocks pride ourselves on our laser-focus on America's most popular publicly-traded stocks. Yet something has been nagging at us: The private markets are becoming more and more important, vital even, to the performance of the public markets.

Yet... private equity really doesn't "fit" in a blog about stocks. Once a company is private, it's removed from the landscape of stuff we can know really, really well. Sure, we shop at Trader Joe's (owned by German private company Aldi Group); we drink the sauvignon blanc from E&J Gallo Winery. But we don't know much about these private companies. No matter how much money we put in their cash registers, we'll never know how profitable they are or how much is going into the CEO's pocket.

So what if we had more insights into this world of finance that, by some estimates, represents a whopping $2 trillion of capital; that overlaps so often as private equity firms take companies off the market for billions and then, sometimes, sends them back out for monetization? What if we could examine the uber-powerful world of private equity more carefully? After all, though we don't know much about the firms' inner workings, or the companies they buy and sell while they're off the market, the private finance industry impacts the public markets greatly, in every way.

That's why we launched BloggingBuyouts, a blog that investigates the private equity firms and the big deals that move markets despite their shadows and secrecy. As a signal of how important is this intersection between private finance and public markets, today at the market's close Blackstone Group, LP, one of the biggest and most fearsome of the private equity juggernauts, filed for an IPO to raise up to $4 billion.

Private equity, in my opinion, is the juiciest of all the financial sectors. While venture capital is more baldly a gamble -- after all, something like 10% of investments actually pay out handsomely -- private equity is a quieter, stuffier, much, much larger gamble. It makes my blood gurgle with excitement.

Private equity firms have been gambling big, of late, and, according to the Wall Street Journal [subscription required] at this wee hour of the morning, they might do even more so by orchestrating an LBO of Harrah's Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:HET). Naturally, the biggie of all private equity gamblers, Texas Pacific Group, is rumored to be involved in the talks to buy out Harrah's, which has a $12.34 billion market value and $10.2 billion in debt. Now there's some leverage.

While this would certainly be the biggest casino company ever bought out by a private equity group, it wouldn't be the first casino company -- Colony Capital, also rumored to be in on discussions, has bought several properties in Atlantic City and Las Vegas -- or the first huge gamble. After all, there's HCA Inc. ($21.3 billion), in my mind (and I was analyst on many a hospital deal in my time in investment banking) a huge hospital management company like HCA is a huge gamble. In hospitals you have two very egocentric, impossible-to-predict, and money-hungry groups pulling your cash flow this way and that: doctors and the U.S. government. Ick.