(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration’s lighter touch on antitrust will lead to a boom in mergers and acquisitions, according to the leader of deal-making firm Perella Weinberg Partners.
“For the last two years or so, the industry has really been wearing a weight vest in the M&A markets — we’ve had a very muscular antitrust authority, not just in the US, but globally,” Chief Executive Officer Andrew Bednar said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “That’s going to be lifted here in the coming months with the new administration.”
Some deals in non-consumer-sensitive industries are still taking from six to 12 months to close, which poses an “unreasonable risk-reward” calculation for a lot of clients who have put some combinations on hold, according to Bednar. The “chilling effect” has been very real, he said.
When it comes to larger deals, Perella started to see an improvement in large-cap merger activity toward the end of last year as M&A conversations picked up, he said. His firm’s large fee business and its backlog are both “up threefold” from where they were a year ago, Bednar said.
“There’s real accelerants now in the business and it’s a little bit hard to contain our enthusiasm,” he said. “The question is whether you’re going to have this rocket fuel be vertical lift-off like a SpaceX rocket.” That’s probably unlikely, he said, but “we’re on a path to taking off and growing M&A.”
Bednar spoke after the firm posted a record $652 million in revenue for the first nine months of this year. Founded in 2006, New York-based Perella advises on mergers and acquisitions and helps companies sort through debt problems. Like its peers, it has hired heavily to prepare for a rebound in M&A activity as lower interest rates boost demand for advisory services.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.