David Solomon

Many of the companies went away.

Amazon became an incredible company.

You're going to see a similar phenomenon here.

I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 12 to 24 months we see a drawdown with respect to equity markets, but that shouldn't be surprising given the run we've had.

But generally speaking, I think what's super exciting is the technology is expanding, new companies are being formed, and the potential of this technology deployed into the enterprise can be very, very powerful.

And so it's an exciting time, and the market looks forward.

The pick-up in deal-making, broadly, is meaningful, but it's particularly accelerated in the US.

And what's driving the pick-up in deal-making is a changed regulatory environment.

So, if you were thinking strategically, and you wanted to really expand your scale or your competitive position in almost any industry,

For the last four years in the United States, the answer was no from a regulatory perspective.

It really wasn't what's the question, what could the answer be?

The answer was no.

And I think CEOs at this point, imagine they're in an environment where you actually can get strategic transactions done to expand your competitive position.

And so we obviously inside Goldman Sachs, we have an early look at that activity and those dialogues.

And I would say it's accelerated very significantly.

If you just look at the facts in terms of what's public,

We've obviously had a very significant M&A quarter.

We had a $1 trillion M&A volume quarter this past quarter.

And if you look at large cap M&A, meaning M&A for companies that are $10 billion or larger, it's up 100% year over year.

So there is real momentum in the deal-making environment.