Goldman Sachs’ Christina Minnis Says M&A ‘Really Picking Up’

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity is picking up, Goldman Sachs’ Christina Minnis, global head of credit and asset finance and head of global acquisition finance within the Capital Solutions Group, said Tuesday (Sept. 2).

Speaking on Bloomberg TV, Minnis said that some companies are taking advantage of “great credit markets” to pursue acquisitions they had passed over in the past and that some sponsor portfolio companies are back to making deals, Bloomberg reported.

So far this year, M&A activity has been flat, though it picked up over the summer after slowing around the time new U.S. tariffs were announced, according to the report.

“We’ve been talking for years about the return of M&A, but what we’ve seen in terms of corporate boardrooms and sponsor willingness to transact is really picking up,” Minnis said, per the report. “We’re quite optimistic about the end of 2025 and going into 2026.”

It was reported May 29 that Goldman Sachs President and Chief Operating Officer John Waldron said he was confident in the bank’s dealmaking pipeline despite tariff-related uncertainty.

At the time, Waldron said that while there was a wider slump in M&A, there was a 30% increase in large deals valued at more than $500 million.

“Our investment banking business is very strong, and I think the outlook remains quite good,” Waldron said in May. “The pipeline is strong all over world … but as we’ve already said, the element of volatility makes it hard” to predict when deals will come to pass.

In the first half of the year, private equity groups held onto their portfolio businesses much longer than anticipated due to company valuations being eaten away by high interest rates, the White House’s stop-and-start tariff policy and geopolitical turmoil.

It was reported in June that PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found that private equity groups were sitting on roughly $1 trillion in unsold assets, representing capital that in a normal market climate would have been given back to investors.

On May 6, it was reported that M&A activity had sunk to its lowest level in 20 years as investment bankers and corporations around the world stopped their dealmaking after the beginning of the global trade war.