Just when the deal community started preparations to decamp to the Hamptons for much of August, the M&A and IPO markets have opened up, leading to sold out Blade flights, packed Jitneys (Ambassador line only), a glut of $25 Round Swam Farm guacamole and your pick of table at the Crow's Nest.

The deal community is enjoying a legitimate late summer M&A rally, something we've been waiting on all year. As Lauren Thomas at The Wall Street Journal highlighted, the last ten days have shown the highest M&A volumes for U.S. companies since 2021. After widespread early-year doubts following Liberation Day, trade pacts between Washington and our foreign counterparts have propelled management teams and their advisors to move quickly in striking their own big boardroom deals, with $125 billion in transactions announced since the end of July.

A nice complement to the resurgence in M&A is a seemingly wide-open IPO window, according to Axios’ Dan Primack, “wide enough to fly a spaceship through it” following aerospace technology firm Firefly’s successful first trading session: shares surged as high as $71.16 after pricing at $45 ahead of Thursday’s listing. The ‘pops’ of new entrants like Figma, Circle, Chime and CoreWeave have demonstrated the market’s hankering for new names.

M&A leaders on Wall Street are echoing bullish sentiment. In one of her last interviews for Bloomberg News, Sonali Basak sat down with Goldman’s Avi Mehrotra to discuss dealmaking in public and private markets, with Mehrotra proclaiming we’re in “early stages” of a multi-year deal cycle with “room to run,” and we are seeing “activity in all geographies across the world, in multiple industry sectors.” When asked about the potential for a $100bn deal anytime soon, Avi asserted, “the C-suite feels that they can get things done at this moment that perhaps they couldn’t’ a few years ago. And we’re also living in a world of multi-trillion-dollar market cap companies and so I do see deals inching higher. Whether we cross $100bn or not remains to be seen.” (Sonali, what’s next?)

While chatting with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in Aspen, Centerview’s Blair Effron chimed in with similar optimism toward deals in TMT and the financial services sector while warning that consumer-oriented corporates “can’t continue to eat the cost of tariffs.”

Have a great weekend,

GPP Team

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Starboard, which in 2023 reached a settlement with Rogers management, disclosed that it has once again taken a stake in the struggling company. The move comes a month after the departure of the CEO following a 30% decline in the stock since the start of the year. Read More

Diligent: Activist Investors Secure Record Board Seats in H1 2025 Amid Shifting Market Landscape

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Jasper Street Monthly: July 2025

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Axios: Colorado becomes second state to require pre-merger notifications

Following the lead of Washington State, earlier this week, Colorado became the second state to require pre-merger notifications. Regardless of industry, this rule is designed to give the state higher visibility into mergers, especially if one or both of the companies do a certain level of business in the state. Read More

Reuters: HNI bets on return-to-office with $2.2 billion deal for furniture maker Steelcase

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Financial Times: UK’s aversion to super-CEOs might be due a rethink

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Cleary Gottlieb: A Clear View: Recent Corporate Updates

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FROM OUR DESK TO YOURS

From the ashes come rebirth when it comes to New York restaurants. The last of the old original French restaurants that graced New York in the 1960s and 70s, La Grenouille (“The Frog”), closed last year, and it was indeed the end of an era—think Jackie Onassis and Truman Capote, think publishing and media titans lunching amid the flow of martinis and the fog of cigarettes. While we’ll never return to those boozy lunch days—daytime drinking is only allowed on vacation—the so-called power lunch is back, or at least lunch is back. The New Yorker has a great piece called “The Case for Lunch.”

Well, months after La Grenouille’s demise, we are thrilled that the empty space in the first level of a townhouse on East 52nd between Madison and Fifth Avenue has now been filled with the famed Beijing Roast Duck house, iDen Quanjude. The Michelin-starred restaurant was founded in 1864, and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai served Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon Quanjude roast duck at their historic visit (says its website). In terms of the menu, it is both a la carte as well as having a tasting menu. Of course, it all starts with the Beijing Duck. But for starters, try the marinated jellyfish with crispy melon, duck soup, amber-glazed peach with edible flower salad. It’s still in the soft opening phase and indeed our insiders tell us the restaurant is looking for tableside duck carvers if our readers know anyone in that specialty or are looking for some shifts. Lunch and dinner are served. 

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• September 8-10: Council of Institutional Investors Fall Conference, San Francisco
• October 28: Knight-Bagehot 50^th Anniversary Celebration, New York
• October 28-29: Berkeley Fall Forum on Corporate Governance, San Francisco

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