Blackstone desperately wants everyone to understand: Things are never as bad as their quarterly numbers might suggest.

Steve Schwarzman probably knew it would be tough managing Wall Street's expectations when he decided to take his company public last summer, but he couldn't have predicted it would be quite this difficult.

Blackstone reported a loss of $66.5 million during the first quarter as fees declined across all segments. Excluding certain compensation costs, the private equity firm lost 6 cents per share, while analysts had expected it to earn 11 cents per share.  

The reason for the shortfall? Lumpiness, of course.

Blackstone executives repeatedly reminded analysts and investors during a conference call that those numbers don't tell the real story. Because Blackstone marks its holdings to their current market value, some of the fees are essentially calculated under the assumption those holdings were being sold at the end of the quarter.

But Blackstone would like everyone to remember that it isn't unloading its holdings in this environment. This is not the market to sell. On the contrary, it's the market to buy.

Blackstone president Tony James echoed many of the comments he made yesterday during a private equity conference in New York. The firm has been taking advantage of the battered leveraged-loan market by buying corporate debt on the cheap. The banks that financed many of the large leveraged buyouts before the credit crunch hit have been sitting on debt used to finance them, and they've become desperate to clear the clutter from their own balance sheets.

James said that most of Blackstone's corporate loan purchases have not been with companies in which they already have an equity stake. Instead, they've bought debt in some companies for which it bid and lost for the equity at auction.

As painful as it might be for Blackstone executives to hammer these points home with investors over and over again, it just might be starting to work.

Blackstone shares fell 2 percent after the earnings release hit the wires. After the 90-minute conference call, they were up more than 3 percent.