Charlie Bouckaert

speaker

135 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Charlie Bouckaert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Making Sense · Deals and discipline: What’s driving markets at mid-year? · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

Thank you for having me.

Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, I mean, to restate some of the themes that you highlighted, obviously activity levels very high.

We're at all time highs in terms of announced M&A volumes.

I think when you look at pipelines across the street, including ours, as well as the shadow backlogs that people have, it really feels like activity levels are going to remain very elevated into the rest of the year.

The other interesting thing is just the composition of that M&A.

We've seen a lot more corporate activity than we typically see.

We've seen a lot more large deals than we typically see.

And we've seen a lot more large complex deals, including cross-border deals underlying that.

So I think that is very much a change versus many of the past few years.

I think the most obvious place to start is the magnitude of AI investment that's happening.

If you want to be a participant in the secular theme of AI, obviously you can start with the hyperscalers and what they're doing, but you can work your way down to other components of the value chain.

The amount of dollars that you need to have to be able to fund that are enormous.

I mean, the numbers are absolutely staggering.

And so I think that kind of ripples through the whole supply chain.

And so even people who are trying to supply things, whether that's chips and how expensive that is or whether it's cooling systems, real estate or anything else, you need to be able to do that at scale.

You need to do it rapidly and you need to have a lot of capital expenditure dollars available.

So that's maybe the most obvious manifestation of it.

But when you think about the geopolitics as well and how fluid the environment is between tariffs, conflict, and just frankly divergence in growth rates and your ability to redeploy, again, scale and geographic concentration and diversity combined are all important.

And so I think that, to your point, really highlights themes that were important before.

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