With stocks buoyed by a flurry of dealmaking activity during early trading Monday—before suffering deep losses in the biotech and Internet sectors by the afternoon—the CEO of private equity titan Blackstone Group told CNBC that company valuations were "on the higher side."
Asked whether companies have been trading at fair value during a busy merger-and-acquisition season, Steve Schwarzman said he feels "absolute levels of securities are pretty high." Still, Schwarzman said his company is "quite active" in looking for turnaround opportunities.
"I don't know about bargains," he said during an interview on "Squawk on the Street."
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Schwarzman would not say that he thought companies were overvalued, and he declined to comment on stock prices. His remarks came as stocks saw an early rally driven by news of high-profile mergers and takeovers, such as Pfizer's renewed bid for AstraZeneca and a possible bidding war between GE and Siemens for French engineering company Alstom.
"Stocks have moved to a price where you can issue them ... to repair a balance sheet, if you had to," Schwarzman said. "So you'll see more activity. And people have been expecting this for the last year or two."
—By CNBC's Jeff Morganteen. Reuters contributed to this report.