BREAKINGVIEWS-M&A jamboree swings to syncopated rhythm

By Jeffrey Goldfarb

NEW ORLEANS, March 20 (Reuters Breakingviews) - After years of skipped beats, dealmakers are finally finding their groove. It’s about to get a little funkier, though. The uptempo pace was evident in New Orleans, where some 900 merger practitioners convened for their annual wingding. As activity steadily crescendos, some emphatic discordant notes are creeping in.

Stephan Feldgoise, the head of global M&A at Goldman Sachs, helped set the tone. In his keynote speech to kick off the Tulane Corporate Law Institute, he posited that it’s the third or fourth year of a typical six-to-seven-year deal cycle. The mega-mergers that defined a near-record haul in 2025 have rolled into 2026, leading to $1.1 trillion of activity so far, a 24% rise from the same stretch a year earlier, according to Dealogic. This top-heavy flow will charge up smaller and mid-sized tie-ups, with increased private equity activity also yet to come, Feldgoise predicted.

Many of the legal and financial consiglieri, whether on the dais or roaming the Roosevelt Hotel, were singing a similar tune. They pointed to accommodative trustbusters and abundant capital offsetting jitters over multiple wars and a looming energy crisis, which have led to a record high in the World Uncertainty Index, as tallied by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. "It feels like the new normal that there will be uncertainty," said Audra Cohen, who co-leads the general practice group at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

Quieter blues also could be heard. Some attendees indicated that the cost of capital is deterring deals, while others blamed market volatility for the stubborn valuation gaps between buyers and sellers. Even the broadly optimistic Scott Barshay, chairman of Paul, Weiss, conceded that “a lot of clients” are staying on the M&A sidelines as they work out how artificial intelligence will affect their businesses. State authorities are also picking up what federal regulators put down, as in the cases against concert venue and ticketing powerhouse Live Nation LYV.N and Nexstar’s plan to buy rival TV broadcaster Tegna TGNA.N.

The volume in Washington is also dialed up to 11. About half of respondents to a pre-conference survey conducted by PR shop Gladstone Place Partners put the Trump administration atop a list of macro factors that will affect merger activity this year. Leo Strine, the former chief justice of the Delaware Supreme Court now affiliated with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, bemoaned a “climate of fear” that clouds dealmaking and creates situations with no legal precedent. He went so far as to invoke father-and-son Haitian autocrats Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier for comparison.

Strine sees these conditions detrimentally affecting boardrooms and stifling cross-border acquisitions. In what makes for a fitting 2026 M&A album title, he added: “This is not normal.”

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CONTEXT NEWS

The 38th annual Tulane Corporate Law Institute was held on March 19 - 20 in New Orleans.