Global M&A
Market Outlooks

CNBC Squawk Box Interview with JPMorgan's Anu Aiyengar – January 16, 2026

IT'S A FRIDAY. JP Morgan is out with its annual global M&A outlook this year, titled "From Turbulence to Transformation." Joining us right now is J.P. Morgan's Global Head of Advisory and Mergers and Acquisitions, Anu Aiyengar. We're very glad to have you here.

Anu Aiyengar: Happy to be here.

Host: All right, so the lead story today in the Wall Street Journal is about how deals powered a record year for the big banks. It was the investment activity that really picked up the M&A activity. So a lot of things happened, and it did turn out for very big numbers. You would characterize the year a little differently, at least compared to six months ago.

Anu Aiyengar: Yes, because I was here about six months ago and it was a very turbulent year. Much has been said, including in this forum, about the year of the mega deals. There were 71 deals north of $10 billion, more than $5 trillion in volume. What we may do is double click on why scale matters. Why are companies doing large deals? Because just scale for scale's sake doesn't make that much sense.

In a world with tremendous uncertainty and risk—geopolitical risk, macro risk—companies need more control over their supply chains, need to be tech-enabled, and need to think about AI and disruption. When there's that level of risk, the more levers you have to pull, the more money you have to reinvest in your business, and the more scale you have, the better you can navigate that environment.

At the same time, on the investor side, companies are hitting trillion-dollar market caps. The size required to be in the S&P 500 or S&P 600 has doubled or tripled in the last five years.

Host: Really.

Anu Aiyengar: Yes, and we now have four companies with $4 trillion-plus market caps. I remember talking about who would be the first to break a trillion. The number of public companies has also declined. If you're an investor trying to beat these indices, which are hitting all-time records, it's hard to do that by investing in a one, two, or three billion dollar company.

Host: I think I just heard Jamie Dimon say in an interview that we've gone from 8,000 publicly traded companies to 4,000.

Anu Aiyengar: That's right. And at the same time, where are the companies to buy at this point? Well, the private companies—when you look at the number of companies in private equity hands or new company formation, founder-owned companies—there are more than 30,000 companies in that ecosystem. If you go back to the same 8,000 to 4,000 time period, it was like 5,000 or so. So that has grown.

The private capital ecosystem—private credit, private equity, private capital solutions—has become a much bigger part of the market. As a company gets very large, and with some very large IPOs coming to market this year and these large mega deals, there's a place for that. For smaller companies, the private capital market has been a much better solution.

Host: Do you see a lot of companies that say they're going public? It used to be that sometimes you'd hear about a company planning to go public, and all of a sudden there'd be a takeover because it was like, "Okay, now it's for sale." With some of these big companies, are there other companies that can even do such a thing? And is this regulatory environment, even though President Trump has talked about trying to open the spigots for certain types of headline-grabbing deals, is he more in the Bernie Sanders camp of things in certain cases?

Anu Aiyengar: Yes. I think the regulatory environment has actually been... It's not that every deal gets approved, right? But when you hear the head of the FTC, head of the DOJ, talk about what they want to see, they talk about wanting to be constructive. They are responding both to structural remedies and behavioral remedies, and want to understand the deal. Every deal does not have smooth sailing. So it's not, you know, come on, this is bonanza. Everyone announces deals, which is also a healthy part of the market.

Host: I just talked about bonanza. That's funny that you said that. We had an interview recently about whether we're doing something wrong in terms of regulations or not making it conducive to public ownership because we need it. For investors and everyone else, there is a scarcity of public equity. Is it something we're doing wrong? Is regulation still too stringent? What is causing people to stay private?

Anu Aiyengar: For a company to be public, you have to deliver on a quarterly time frame, which is a bit harder. When you have to have transformations in companies, which take a longer time period, we talk about the classic case of why a company goes private or stays private. Historically, some of the reasons you couldn't do that were because you didn't have enough money in the private markets. So you said, "Oh, I want to grow, I need to use my currency, and so I need to be public in order to do that." Whereas today, the private capital sources are large enough. We just talked about the secondary market growing 60% year over year.

Host: Yeah.

Anu Aiyengar: So, as you said earlier, there would be companies that think, "I can go public or I can sell." Whereas today...

Host: It seems like in terms of inequality and everything else that we talk about, it's probably not good that if you're an average investor, you can't get access.

Anu Aiyengar: Or you've got to open up the private markets, which also gets blowback because they're not accessible to everyone. Having a robust public market is a good thing, and having more companies be public is a good thing. At the same time, having plenty of private capital that's available—and all private capital is not just these large private equity firms. There are several middle market private equity firms, several founder-owned companies raising money from friends and family, and they're able to do that in today's environment versus 20 years ago, when you wouldn't think about doing that. So, several new companies are getting formed, several founder-owned businesses, and that ecosystem is very strong.

Host: Okay. What would slow down the deal activity this year? We're expecting some really big numbers, probably a record year. What would slow that down, and what's the likelihood of any of those things happening?

Anu Aiyengar: Look, I think we still have a lot of risk and a lot of changing policy.

Host: Yeah.

Anu Aiyengar: So that impacts the psyche of people and deals, especially bigger deals. Currently, we're in an environment where you see one deal happening in a sector, and then you see more deals happening. The financing environment has been very favorable. The investor community has been favorable. The synergies that people have said they're going to get out of those deals—there is a lot of thought and work that goes into it, and boards have been supportive. So the ingredients you need, you need all of this to be pulling in the same direction. Any one in this ecosystem has a shock, then you have to deal with that challenge. Likewise, I think you may see a lot more deals in this in-between spectrum, because you saw, I think, over $1 trillion of minority deals last year. That's 20% of the overall M&A deal volume. So deals which are structured, which are not straight 100% sales—staggered deals where it's not a 100% sale at one point in time, you do it over time. Partnership deals, all of those types of flavors we'll see as well. More creativity and innovation in deal doing, not only in the businesses that companies run.

Host: Thank you for coming in.

Anu Aiyengar: Thank you very much.

Host: Good to see you.