Matt Wertz

There are antitrust concerns with that.

And the Trump administration has indicated that they're going to

be a little bit more play along with those kind of deals.

Another thing is that private equity, which tends to be the fuel to the fire of these cyclical trends, they've been building up a lot of what they call dry powder.

They just have a lot of money to spend.

The other thing that we're seeing, and this involves firms like Silver Lake, is that we just have a lot of easy debt available again.

Now, what we've

What's similar to past cycles is the banks are lending again.

They've had big profits.

M&A is coming back.

M&A drives a lot of fees for banks and they want to be involved.

I like to think of this as kind of like the circle of life of Wall Street and capital markets, where right now it's like the rainy season just happened.

On the Serengeti, there's like all the grasses are growing and like the population is booming and everyone's feasting.

And there's a lot of things that are contributing to that.

And that leads to a lot of transactions, some of which do very well, but some of which, particularly those that have a lot of debt, if the market turns.

And so like if we go into a drought, for example, those deals get harder to both execute.

So we could see some hiccups because these deals take time.

a year or more to transact.

And then they could also not perform as expected once they're done because they're being transacted in a market where everyone has very rosy expectations.

And if the economy, for example, goes into a downturn or a sector has a change like a new technology, like artificial intelligence, things might not work out as planned.