Partner and co-head of US Corporate and M&A Ethan Klingsberg recently appeared on Bloomberg TV during "Bloomberg Markets: Americas" to discuss what clients need to know about M&A and capital markets right now, including:
- How institutional shareholders are now expecting listed companies to approach strategic alternatives
- The impact of the commodification of private equity sponsors and the shift from reliance on commercial bank debt to direct lenders and sovereign wealth and Middle Eastern money to fund LBOs
- The tension between re-sets by boards of their internal projections and the expectations of many activist investors, and how this tension will play out
- How Freshfields is outmaneuvering antitrust regulators through "fix it first" remedies, acceleration of timelines for responding to demands for information, and not being shy about resorting to litigation against the regulators, and what this means for the efforts of regulators to "throw sand in the gears" of M&A strategies
- The consequences of not fully understanding the new and expanding world of foreign investment and national security regulation of M&A, the latest egregious foreign investment clearance regime in Europe, and the potential movement in the US toward a "reverse CFIUS" regime
- The strength of the US capital markets and the expected wave of migration of issuers listed outside the US-to-US listings
- Why leveraged spin-offs will be the mode of choice for separation of non-core operations in a world of challenging financing and regulatory risks for M&A
- Why boards are now ripe for pursuing accretive and synergistic mergers of equals and why those directors and executives who will pursue these transactions but not have positions at the combined company will be heroes of shareholder value creation
The full interview can be found here.
