Blackstone (BX) president and COO Jon Gray on Thursday became the latest high-ranking Wall Street executive to declare that a dealmaking freeze triggered by President Trump’s tariffs is now firmly in the past.
“We believe the dealmaking pause is behind us,” Gray, Blackstone’s No. 2 executive behind CEO Stephen Schwarzman, told analysts Thursday, citing “the largest forward IPO pipeline since 2021.”
Schwarzman reinforced that sentiment, saying to the same analysts that “we are preparing a number of other companies for public offerings over the coming quarters.”
Blackstone’s stock rose more than 4% Thursday. It is up 4% so far this year, underperforming major stock indexes that notched records Wednesday.
The statements from top executives at Blackstone echo what the leaders of the nation’s biggest Wall Street banks said last week.
They repeatedly made it clear that their corporate clients are becoming used to the uncertainty surrounding trade and are moving ahead with plans to merge with other companies, raise debt, or go public anyway.
“Boardrooms appear more accepting of ongoing uncertainty broadly,” Morgan Stanley (MS) CEO Ted Pick said on July 16.
Volatility “is going to, I suspect, be a feature, not a bug of the new world order and we will benefit from that,” Citigroup (C) CEO Jane Fraser said on July 15.
Three months ago, a sense of gloom hovered over Wall Street’s first quarter earnings season as bankers and private equity executives grappled with a halt in dealmaking and the market chaos that followed Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariff announcement.
That gloom has been replaced by optimism as Wall Street digests some red-hot IPOs and sizable mergers along with a deregulatory push in Washington, D.C.
The latest reminder that the M&A market is heating up came on Thursday when Union Pacific (UNP) confirmed advanced talks with Norfolk Southern (NSC) about a potential combination that would make the rail industry’s largest deal ever.
“The environment we see emerging — lower short-term interest rates, less uncertainty, and continued economic growth, combined with a pent-up desire to transact — is the right recipe to reignite M&A and IPO activity,” Blackstone’s Gray added Thursday.
New negotiations and trade pacts with certain countries are also helping Wall Street get more comfortable with the uncertainty.
“It remains to be seen how individual negotiations will play out, but the direction of travel is toward more resolutions,” Schwarzman, a billionaire GOP donor who was one of Trump’s biggest backers on Wall Street during the 2024 campaign, told analysts.
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