Lauren Thomas

Jamie Dimon or JP Morgan to finance your deal.

There are all these other sources of capital out there.

The money is just flowing much more freely now.

The whole private equity universe, they'd really been sitting on the sidelines.

Now that you've started to see interest rates come down, that's particularly given this private equity group more confidence that they can go out and do deals and get those done.

Watching Trump and what's going on down in D.C.

is going to continue to be a huge factor in the M&A market.

One reason why you started to see this surge in deals in the back half of 2025 is just

CEOs got more comfortable with Trump and the fact that Trump would be OK with your deal.

And so on a moment's notice, that could change.

And you've seen Trump will come out and post about a particular company.

And so there's kind of this red card.

of what is he going to say?

What does he think?

And so watching that as carefully and closely as we can will allow us to continue to have a pulse on just where the next big deals could be coming from.

Certainly some of the deals in 2025 that have really been centered around America first, making America strong.

It's deals like that that you can really craft a narrative around it to kind of match up with what

what Trump is trying to accomplish down in D.C., those, I think, have had the best odds of getting announced so far.

So we'll definitely be looking for more of that.

When the Biden administration turned over, you had one individual in particular, Lina Khan, was kind of notoriously against, you know, monopolies and really the idea of M&A in general. And so with her moving on, there was...