Wall Street Thought 2025 Would Be a Deal-Making Bonanza Under Trump — Then Reality Hit

The original story by Lillian Rizzo for CNBC.

Going into 2025, bankers and CEOs were practically rubbing their hands together. Trump was back, regulators were expected to ease up, and the assumption was simple: mergers and acquisitions were about to explode.

That didn’t exactly happen.

Yes, the year delivered some headline-grabbing monster deals — think Union Pacific’s proposed $85 billion bid for Norfolk Southern, Netflix’s proposed $72 billion play for chunks of Warner Bros. Discovery, and a roughly $50 billion take-private move involving Electronic Arts. But once you got past the mega headlines, the broader market looked… kind of sluggish.

“When you read the headlines they seem to suggest there has never been a better M&A market,” said Benjamin Sibbett, co-head of Clifford Chance’s Americas M&A practice. “But when you get underneath… you see a less active market.”

PitchBook data backs that up. Through Dec. 15, the US logged about 13,900 deals, down from roughly 15,940 over the same stretch in 2024. Deal count fell — even as overall deal value climbed.

And that’s the weird 2025 paradox in a nutshell: fewer deals, bigger price tags. Total deal value tracked by PitchBook hit around $2.4 trillion this year, up from roughly $1.83 trillion in 2024, driven by those megadeals.

A big chunk of the pause came early. Instead of a smooth “pro-business” runway, companies got a year that started with executives trying to read tea leaves: tariffs, rates, and Washington’s vibe.

Trump’s rolling trade moves — especially the April “Liberation Day” tariff announcements — threw sand in the gears. Corporate leaders across sectors started using the same phrase on earnings calls: “macroeconomic uncertainty.” Translation: We don’t know what costs will look like, so we’re not betting the company on a big acquisition right now.

“We knew there was going to be some disruption with tariffs,” said KPMG partner Lenny LaRocca, “but probably not to the extent that… slowed things down.”

Retail and consumer companies felt it hardest, stuck guessing whether they could pass higher costs to shoppers who were already stretched. In the retail sector alone, PitchBook shows 227 US deals through mid-December, down from 296 a year earlier — even though the total dollar value was higher.

Then you had the other two deal-killers: high interest rates (expensive borrowing) and AI spending (big capital commitments that can crowd out M&A budgets).

If 2025 had a signature look, it was big companies buying scale while a lot of mid-sized activity stayed muted. JPMorgan’s Anu Aiyengar summed it up: this year saw a “decade-high level of megadeals,” and the market kept rewarding scale.

But that doesn’t mean dealmakers got the easy mode they expected. Even with looser vibes at some agencies, companies still had to navigate what one banker described as an unpredictable process for getting deals blessed by the administration.

Autos were supposed to be ripe for consolidation, but shifting EV policy, tariffs, and cost pressures made companies hit the brakes.

Media companies were desperate to merge, but still found themselves waiting on regulatory changes, waivers, and the political mood. Some deals moved faster than under Biden-era regulators — but not everything was a green light.

Meanwhile, health care and biotech ended the year with more mid-market action as big drugmakers hunted for pipeline fixes ahead of looming patent cliffs — even as the sector digested Trump policy swings and agency shakeups.

By late 2025, dealmaking started to look more “normal,” or at least normal for a year where everyone’s constantly pricing in geopolitics, trade policy, and the Fed. Bankers say the market adjusted — and in banking, especially, consolidation sped up.

One banker cited a surge in announced bank deals in the second half of the year, helped by activist pressure and faster approvals.

Bottom line: Wall Street wasn’t totally wrong — the megadeals were real. But the idea that Trump’s return would instantly turn 2025 into a dealmaking free-for-all? That part didn’t survive contact with tariffs, rates, and uncertainty.