, Columnist
Levine on Wall Street: Surging Mergers and Tracing Bonds
A lot of fun capital-markets arcana today. Poison pill fights, mini-tenders, revolving doors, short-sale bans. Also I guess there's a lot of M&A.
M&A is back.
After like four years of "not a lot of deals but the backlog is strong," the backlog has arrived. Highlights: $1.77 trillion of mergers and acquisitions in the first half of 2014, the most since 2007. It's driven by big deals; the number of deals announced in the first half is the lowest since 2005. Strategics, not sponsors. Lots of inversions. A surprising number of hostile deals. My former employers are #1 in the banking league table (congrats!) and #12 in the legal league table (umm?). And somehow a lawyer -- at Skadden, at the top of the legal league table -- says "it feels like we’re drinking out of a fire hose," and come on, let's retire that phrase.