Wall Street Journal Podcasts
2021 was a big year for deals. Major transactions included AT&T's agreement with Discovery to combine their media assets into a new publicly traded company. Square, the payments company also agreed to acquire AfterPay the buy now, pay later provider. And Oracle right before the holidays agreed to acquire Cerner, a medical records company. It wasn't just the volume or the value of deals that were struck, it was the type of transactions that were struck. A major factor driving deal making was SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies. Those of course are big publicly traded pools of money that typical have a two year window to announce an acquisition. And so SPAC transactions accounted for about 11% of global deal values according to an analysis by Bain. And so SPACs influenced the market not only by buying companies, but also by just prompting privately held companies to consider selling.