At a gathering of the nation’s top mergers and acquisitions lawyers and bankers, the consensus was that under the Trump presidency, deal making should boom.
Lower taxes and less regulation, the thinking goes, should contribute to strong stock prices. And when the markets are up, companies are more likely to strike big deals. Finally, the pro-business Trump administration, most deal makers believe, is likely to take a forgiving view when it comes to antitrust matters.
Taken together, it was enough to lift the spirits of the lawyers, bankers and other advisers who attended Tulane University’s mergers conference last week.
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Then there was the prospect that the Republicans’ failure to pass a replacement for Obama-era health care regulations made a sweeping tax law overhaul less likely. Some deal makers feared that the issues on which they most want to see reform — corporate tax rates and the taxation of sales made abroad and then brought back to the United States — could end up felled by political gridlock.
“Post-heath care, we have to consider a number of scenarios, one of which is that nothing happens,” said Eileen T. Nugent of the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
And finally, there is Mr. Trump himself, and his brand of economic populism.
Merger proposals that would lead to big job cuts would be unlikely to go anywhere, George R. Bason Jr. of the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell said, calling such layoffs “a tragedy for a lot of people.”
