At the end of the day, it’s just a number. Nonetheless, it’s a double-digit number that begins with a “2″ — and one that Blackstone Group and its shareholders would have liked to stay above on the New York Stock Exchange.

For the first time since the private equity giant went public, its stock finished below $20 on Monday, even as the Dow and S&P ended higher. That’s right. It’s trading in the teens.
    
It’s a milestone few expected in the spring, when Blackstone IPO hype was at its height, or even when shares priced at $31 in June and sprung higher when they opened. Then the stock fell, and has continued to do so. The sub-$20 dip came on a day when Blackstone took a bit of a bruising in the press. What a difference a few months makes.   
    
The New York Post came out swinging on Sunday with a Blackstone gut shot in an article on its CEO’s response to the PHH deal falling apart. The article seemed a tad hysterical in its accusations, and made mention of Blackstone Chief Steve Schwarzman offering peace pipes to the CEOs of the two banks that were supposed to finance the deal but didn’t: JPMorgan and Lehman. 
    
In fact, Deal Journal said that according to a person familiar with the matter, no such meetings took place, though the person did concede that duking it out with the banks wasn’t worth it.
    
The fact that Blackstone didn’t put up a fight shows that the firm probably wasn’t all that bummed by the collapse. PHH’s exposure to real estate market woes would be enough to make any buyer cringe — not to mention their bankers — when the mortgage mess and credit crunch came into full view during the summer.

And so it is that the private equity darlings and its CEO who shined during the height of the buyout boom endured another down day–symbolic in its representation of a leveraged buyout market brought to its knees by the credit crisis.

(NYSE trader. Reuters file)