Deals and discipline: What’s driving markets at mid-year?
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What does the first half of 2026 reveal about market resilience and volatility?
Welcome to JPMorgan's Making Sense. I'm Evan Junick, Global Head of Corporate Finance Advisory. Today, I'm joined by Charlie Bugart, Global Head of Advisory and M&A. Charlie recently stepped into this role at a moment when markets are showing an unusual mix of resilience and complexity. At mid-year, we're seeing a market that has absorbed a lot. Geopolitical shocks, commodity volatility, a more complicated rates backdrop, and ongoing questions around the return on AI and other growth investment. At the same time, capital markets have remained receptive, companies are still investing, and the M&A market has been notably active. For today's conversation, we're going to look at that mid-year picture through two primary lenses.
First, we'll draw on the global M&A mid-year outlook, which gives us a view into deal activity, boardroom behavior, and what it means for companies to be strategically ready. And second, we'll draw on our CFA mid-year work, which we're calling Building Through Uncertainty, which looks at macro conditions, market resilience, AI capex scrutiny, and much more. Charlie, lots to discuss today. Thanks for joining.
Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
So let's start with the basics. Why don't you give us just a rough sense of the first six months of 2026? What did the M&A outlook look like and what have we learned so far?
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.
Yeah, I think in some regards, this is just a lot of the themes we've been highlighting for years now coming to fruition, right? The themes we've talked about in the past, but are resonating today, right? One is the premium for growth. We've seen a significant premium for growth across the market, really almost any way you slice it, whether you talk about large cap companies and the relative growth that they're exhibiting and their valuations. And we'll talk a little bit more later about how that's actually manifesting, not just in M&A, but also in broader investment trends as well.
How have M&A volumes and deal composition changed in the first six months?
The other theme we've seen is one of the value of scale. And these are themes we've seen now several years. Again, we can't predict the future, but we know these themes have become more and more durable over time. Talk to us a little bit about that theme of scale. What do we see in the data that really illustrates that perceived value of scale, both from our corporate clients and then the broader market as well?
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.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What does the first half of 2026 reveal about market resilience and volatility?
0:03–2:15
2
How have M&A volumes and deal composition changed in the first six months?
2:15–7:35
3
Why are growth premiums and scale becoming critical for corporate strategy?
7:35–10:54
4
What does the massive AI‑related capital spending tell us about scale and risk?
10:54–14:30
5
How are capital markets staying receptive while companies de‑risk their balance sheets?
14:30–17:47
6
What’s driving the shift from sponsor‑led to strategic‑led M&A activity?
17:47–22:12
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Making Sense
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