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Transactions of $10bn or more have hit an all-time record in 2025 after Donald Trump’s deregulatory push unleashed Wall Street’s animal spirits and a blitz of global dealmaking.

Naver’s $10.3bn all-stock acquisition of South Korea’s biggest crypto exchange Upbit on Wednesday took this year’s megadeal total to 63, topping the 2015 record, according to LSEG data on transactions since 1988.

The frenzy comes despite a sluggish start to the year after the US president’s “liberation day” tariffs sparked weeks of market volatility and deep uncertainty about interest rates and the global economic outlook.

“Companies are taking advantage of this window to pursue the larger transactions that they’ve long wanted to do and have been expected by the market,” said Ivan Farman, global co-head of mergers and acquisitions at Bank of America.

“When you see big deals being struck in your industry, you don’t want to be left out when the chess pieces move.”

Deals roared back in the second half of 2025 as CEOs pounced on once-in-a-generation transactions, including Union Pacific’s $85bn bid for Norfolk Southern, the $55bn Saudi-backed take-private of Electronic Arts, Anglo American’s $50bn merger with Teck and Kimberly-Clark $49bn takeover of Tylenol maker Kenvue.

Edward Lee, a corporate partner at Kirkland & Ellis, said CEOs and boards now had the “confidence and visibility” to chase “big strategic moves that they postponed for two years because of interest-rate uncertainty, inflation and the election”.

The greater visibility would allow deals that were previously hitting regulatory roadblocks to finally get done, Lee added.

The second half of the year deal blitz comes after Trump pulled back from a full-blown trade war with China and choked back some of his most aggressive tariffs, all while doubling down on M&A-friendly measures, including relaxing antitrust rules.

“There’s a feeling right now in the current regulatory environment that there’s a chance to do larger-scale transactions that you may not have the opportunity to do again,” said Krishna Veeraraghavan, co-head of Paul Weiss’s M&A group.

The animal spirits have spread across sectors. Bank M&A surged as deals were approved at the fastest pace in more than three decades, while Big Pharma roared back, acquiring biotech assets to restock their drug pipelines. A boom in artificial intelligence spurred a wave of tech and data centre transactions.

“We’re seeing increased activity not just in tech, driven by a tsunami of money going into AI infrastructure, but also in healthcare, industrials, financial and other sectors,” said Drago Rajkovic, global co-head of M&A at Citigroup.

“Why are there so many large deals? There has been a lot of pent-up demand, a favourable regulatory environment and healthy balance sheets,” he added.

But M&A has been stronger among larger companies than smaller ones, a sign that deal activity remains uneven.

“Small deals are often harder to get done as they’re less interesting to buyers because they don’t move the needle. Fundamentally, smaller deals have lower returns, so there’s a trend towards our clients focusing on large transactions,” said Andrew Woeber, global head of M&A at Barclays.

As financial traders milled around 26 floors up in a tower in the Canary Wharf district of London, there was little sign of nerves ahead of Rachel Reeves’s second budget – until the surprise accidental early release of the government’s official economic analysis started to move markets.

Headline numbers from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) flashed through on banks of computer screens, followed shortly by the detailed analysis itself.

“Boom! There’s your 200-pager,” said Will Marsters, a sales trader at Saxo UK, a trading platform that hosted the Guardian for the announcement. The leak triggered a race across trading desks in the City of London to understand the implications of the leaked forecasts – and laughter at the hapless forecaster.

It was a chaotic start to the budget, but more important for financial investors and the Treasury was the reaction on currency and bond markets. The Labour government was desperate to avoid a repeat of the Liz Truss “mini-budget” debacle, when borrowing costs surged, eventually bringing about the downfall of the Conservative government.

The reaction on Wednesday was choppy, but not dramatic by the standards of the Truss government. The yield on the benchmark 10-year gilt – a measure of the cost of government borrowing – dropped quickly from 4.5% to about 4.42%. A few minutes later it was back up above 4.52%.

By the late afternoon yields had fallen back once more, to 4.4%. The declining borrowing cost over the day will likely be a relief for Reeves – and a sign that markets do not think lending money to the UK has become more risky.

“The tempered growth didn’t seem too optimistic, which eroded some of the risk premium,” said Marsters.

Neil Wilson, an investor strategist at Saxo UK, said: “There’s no great stinging surprise that has upset markets. That has allowed it to be a bit of a relief.”

However, he wondered about the credibility of the forecasts: governments often promise to tighten budgets in later years in order to make the sums add up. With elections expected around the same time, he said the prospect of welfare cuts or tax rises in four years’ time was remote.

“You’re saying we’re going to buy fiscal restraint by the end of the parliament,” Wilson said. “‘Don’t worry about welfare – we’ll sort it out’.”

The value of the pound also jumped in initially volatile trading after the OBR leak. It then fell as low as $1.3124, before recovering by late afternoon to $1.3229 – an increase of 0.5% for the day.

Mike Owen, another sales trader, said: “Everyone was fearing the worst, so the price action is, ‘Phew’. It’s such a minefield to try to get through it.”