Morgan Stanley’s Simkowitz Says M&A Announcements Are ‘on Pause’

Merger and acquisition announcements and new equity issuance are “certainly on pause” as clients assess the Trump administration’s policy changes, said Morgan Stanley Co-President Dan Simkowitz.

“The bar is high because of some of the policy uncertainties,” Simkowitz said Tuesday at the Morgan Stanley European Financials Conference. Still, the activity “just gets paused, it doesn’t get deleted.” Credit capital raises, meanwhile, have been “right around record levels for the first two months of the year,” he said.

In the weeks after Donald Trump won the US presidential election in November, top bank executives took turns describing “animal spirits” in ...