Goldman M&A Chief Says Massive Capital Pools Will Drive Long-Term Deals

Stephan Feldgoise, Goldman Sachs's head of global M&A, made a pointed case Wednesday that current market turbulence is noise against a much larger signal: the sheer volume of capital looking for a home.

"Wall Street is awash in 'massive pools of capital' that should drive M&A activity over the long-term, even as volatility upends dealmaking," Feldgoise said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. His argument, in brief: the money is too big and too restless to stay on the sidelines for long.

"There is an incredible amount of capital sitting with investors," Feldgoise said. "Public equity, private equity, public debt, private debt. That quantum of capital is substantial, looking to invest in transactions into companies. There's lots of ways that capital can reach its destination."

For anyone on Goldman's M&A desk tracking deal flow, that framing matters. Feldgoise is not predicting a snapback; he is arguing the structural conditions for dealmaking are intact regardless of what rattles markets week to week. The distinction has real stakes for bankers whose bonus pools are tied directly to advisory fees on closed transactions.

The evidence he cited for current market health is hard to dismiss. Feldgoise explained why he remains "relatively optimistic" about the M&A environment in 2026 and expects new company formations in the software space. More concretely, leveraged buyouts are at all-time highs and the market for big-ticket M&A, deals worth $5 billion or $10 billion or more, is as good as it has ever been, Feldgoise said. He noted he is seeing almost double the amount of deals in the $5 billion to $10 billion range, a trend he said mirrored M&A cycles of the early 2000s and 2010s.

That claim is backed by market-wide data. The U.S. M&A market saw the biggest surge of mega deals in the last decade in 2025; 11 transactions were announced with values upward of $30 billion, compared to seven in 2024 and four in 2023, with aggregate deal value surpassing $2 trillion for the first time since 2021. Global buyout value increased 39% to approximately $850 billion in 2025, with 13 mega-buyouts recorded, more than double the prior year, while North America led with buyout value rising 69% to approximately $500 billion.

The headwinds Feldgoise acknowledged are real. Artificial intelligence is scrambling software valuations, complicating how acquirers price assets in a sector that has been central to deal flow for years. Feldgoise has noted that AI will affect not just the global economic and geopolitical landscape, but will have a massive impact on the M&A market, touching not just AI companies or hyperscalers but also software, data centers, semiconductors, real estate, power, and transmission. That breadth cuts both ways: it creates uncertainty in some valuations while opening new categories of strategic dealmaking in others.

Private capital has moved to the center of M&A dealmaking; traditional siloed financing products are being replaced by new private capital solutions offering more bespoke, flexible structures and allowing for larger, more complex transactions. Private equity now represents roughly 40% of the M&A market, and private credit continues to gain steam with expectations it will more than double by 2030. That is the infrastructure behind Feldgoise's capital pools argument: it is not simply that money exists, but that the architecture for deploying it into large transactions has never been more developed.

Feldgoise has characterized 2026 in three words: "technology, globalization, and ambition." For associates and VPs grinding through due diligence on mandates that may or may not close amid the current volatility, the message from the top of Goldman's dealmaking franchise is that the cycle is not broken. The capital is there. The question is which transactions it flows into first.