Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray: ‘M&A will come back’

“M&A is a cyclical business,” said Jon Gray , the president and chief operating officer of Blackstone . The remarks came during a Fireside Chat with Richard Melville , editorial director, US, of PEI Group at the?NEXUS 2024 summit?on March 7.

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“Three times in the last 30 years, M&A has gone down by 50 to 60 percent: in the early ’90s, in ’08-’09 after the financial crisis, and the last two years. And in those previous two periods of time, within four or five years, you got back to those levels, and then you went higher,” Gray said.

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“And you’d say, ‘Why is that?’ Well, if you have a growing equity market, and you have growing asset value around the world, things happen. A private equity firm needs to sell a business, a family has something happen in their lives, an institution needs liquidity. I describe M&A as almost like flotation devices below the water; eventually they’ll come up. And so M&A will come back.”

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Gray pointed out that, historically, M&A doesn’t come back immediately to the peak level. “You start to slowly build. I would think of this as a transitional year.”

To hear the full conversation click here.