It must have been sweet music to the ears of bankers sitting in advisory departments across the globe. After two years of falling volumes, mass lay-offs and sorry looking deal pipelines, here was the M&A pick-up they had been dreaming about for so long. When it arrived, it did so in dramatic style. Over $80 billion of deals were announced on October 27, the biggest volume of deals announced on a single day since the height of the M&A boom in 2000.
Bank of America declared that it was paying around $47 billion in an all-stock deal for FleetBoston. Anthem agreed to pay $16.4 billion for WellPoint Health Networks to create the world's largest managed care company. British American Tobacco said it was merging its US subsidiary Brown & Williamson with US tobacco company RJ Reynolds in...
