00:00The pick-up and deal-making broadly is meaningful, but it's particularly accelerated in the U.S.
00:07And what's driving the pick-up and deal-making is a changed regulatory environment.
00:12So if you were thinking strategically and you wanted to really expand your scale or your competitive position in almost any industry,
00:20for the last four years in the United States, the answer was no from a regulatory perspective.
00:25It really wasn't what's the question, what could the answer be, the answer was no.
00:28And I think CEOs at this point, imagine they're in an environment where you actually can get strategic transactions done to expand your competitive position.
00:38And so we obviously, inside Goldman Sachs, we have an early look at that activity and those dialogues.
00:43And I would say it's accelerated very significantly.
00:46If you just look at the facts in terms of what's public, we've obviously had a very significant M&A quarter.
00:51We had a $1 trillion M&A volume quarter this past quarter.
00:55And if you look at large cap M&A, meaning M&A for companies that are $10 billion or larger, it's up 100% year over year.
01:04So there is real momentum in the deal-making environment.
01:08I think you're going to see an acceleration of that into 26 for sure.
01:12And increasingly, CEOs are testing what the bounds are of their ability to enhance their competitive position
01:19or improve their scale and their lead where they have a leading position in a variety of industries.
01:24And I think the regulatory environment is going to permit that at the moment.
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