Welcome to the latest Dealmaker Quarterly. This edition comes at a juncture that whoever wrote the Chinese proverb about "interesting times" couldn’t have imagined. And that makes our job of predicting what the upcoming presidential election means for dealmakers even more difficult than usual.
But of course neither Covid-19-inspired market disruption nor the ever-heightening political warfare dividing government has kept us from trying, and we think you’ll find in the pages of our quarterly an insightful quartet of analyses about everything from climate risk disclosure and antitrust policy to proxy battles and bank regulation as they relate to M&A, activism, restructuring and private equity, courtesy of writers David Hatch, Ronald Orol and Steve Gelsi.
Trump vs. Biden, the coronavirus-driven market turmoil, growing fears of Big Tech’s dominance, worries about the planet’s ecological health, all create a great deal of uncertainty for dealmaking today. But David, Ron and Steve have done yeoman’s work attempting to cut through it, and we wager that you’ll feel less at sea as you ply your trade thanks to their efforts.
Toss in the staff’s mini profiles of the latest crop of M&A partners, whom we deem Rising Stars, and our Q1 Quarterly provides reason to hope that 2020 won’t be as difficult a year as it currently looks to be, and will help you steer through it regardless.
By Ronald Fink, Deputy Managing Editor