One possible explanation is that venture capitalists had much better investment opportunities available to them in the 1990s, as the technology revolution gathered speed, whereas buy-out funds were badly hit by the collapse of the junk-bond market in the late 1980s and the recession of the early 1990s.
But are patience, learning and integrity the virtues that mark him out in a government of bond-traders and spin-doctors the right qualities for dealing with post-Soviet Russia, where scholarship is out of fashion and gamesmanship is in?
He and the firm created almost out of whole cloth the high yield bond market that financed so many cutting-edge corporate entities in the 1970s and 1980s.