M&A Drought: The coming M&A drought

The mergers and acquisitions business is about to take a deep dive. For most of the financial crisis, it has remained surprisingly buoyant. This was partly because there was a lot of business to be done selling troubled banks such as Merrill Lynch, HBOS and Fortis. There was also the overhang of deals from the bubble era. But in the past week, two such mega-deals – BHP’s hostile bid for Rio and the planned leveraged buyout of Canada’s BCE – have come apart at the seams. The credit crisis is also...