‘Vortex of Volatility’ Kept 2025 Dealmaking From Breaking Records

As dealmakers welcomed 2025 with toasts at their Aspen and Palm Beach vacation homes, hopes were high that a business-friendly White House would usher in an M&A boom. 

Their champagne dreams mostly came true, though political volatility in DC proved an obstacle at times, too.

Worthy of Brags and Hitting Snags

Last week, Dealogic analysts reported that companies agreed to $4.8 trillion worth of global mergers and acquisitions this year, the second-highest on record after the frenzied boom times of 2021. The geographic driver was North America, where the $2.6 trillion in deal volume, a 52% increase over 2024, represented 55% of the global total. The financial powerhouses behind this revival were megadeals, or transactions worth more than $5 billion, which hit a record 70. Standout deals included Union Pacific’s $88 billion purchase of Norfolk Southern and a consortium including the Saudi Public Investment Fund taking Electronic Arts private for $56.6 billion.

The ascent was far from smooth, however. “April’s Liberation Day tariff announcement choked activity before a summer reacceleration,” Dealogic’s report noted, adding that mid-market companies, more subject to volatility, “mostly stayed on the sidelines” in 2025, contributing to the megadeal dominance. “I’m cautiously optimistic M&A will be better in 2026 than in 2025, but not at 2021 levels,” Paul Aversano, global practice leader at Alvarez & Marsal, told the report’s authors. “The vortex of volatility swirling around the world is starting to calm down, and people are coming back to the market. The large deals are happening first, and then we will see more activity from the middle market.”

IPOs in 2025 followed a similar trajectory. The $170.6 billion in proceeds raised from more than 1,300 IPOs was the best since 2022. In the Americas, listing volumes of $77.9 billion nearly doubled the $42.4 billion in 2024. But the revival hit even more snags, according to data released Monday by Dealogic:

• Global equity capital market deal volumes declined on a quarterly basis in the last three months of the year amid the US government shutdown. Dealogic analysts said transactions in the Americas were hit hardest: Notably, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US IPO regulator, was “reduced to a skeleton staff,” and companies affected by a tech and crypto selloff around the same time opted to postpone their plans to go public.
• “The figures on the face of it don’t look too disappointing, but given the huge momentum that had been building in the US IPO market through September, the pause in the calendar due to the shutdown turned what could have been a spectacular quarter into a merely good one,” analysts said. 

Last-Minute Shopping: Roughly $464 billion in mergers and acquisitions have been announced so far in December, according to Dealogic, nearly a third more than last year. IBM’s $11 billion purchase of data platform operator Confluent and the Netflix-Paramount duel over Warner Bros Discovery are among the major deals now in the pipeline. The IPO market, meanwhile, is fresh off the biggest listing of the year last week, when medical supplies company Medline raised $6.2 billion.