Welcome to the first (and only) forum top executives and investors
need to attend to start 2015 off with a bang...

Mergers and Acquisitions
Conference 2015

New York City
January 16
9AM - 5PM

Bruce Wasserstein, the Wall Street investment banker who helped pioneer the hostile takeover in the 1980s and reshaped the mergers and acquisitions business into a high art, was ambivalent about his trade. The best rainmakers were capable men, he once said according to The Economist, but deal making also attracted “hustlers and swaggering mediocrities”. Whereas takeovers made the business world more dynamic, they also led to “pain, dislocations and blunders”.

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Whether deal making brings more positives than negatives is once again an important question, because it is back with a vengeance: U.S. M&A roared back to life and is up 50% this year. Deal activity is now running at its highest levels on record at estimated trillion and a half for 2014, the first time that it would cross that level for a full year.

The record run has been driven by strong demand from both domestic and foreign buyers that include Chinese investors. The value of announced U.S. domestic M&A volume, where both the buyer and seller are based locally, is up 33%. Meanwhile, the value of announced deals in which a foreign firm is buying a local one has multiplied three times from last year’s total. In fact, four of the ten biggest deals in the U.S. involve foreign buyers.

Goldman Sachs has cemented its position as the top Wall Street bank for mergers and acquisitions in one of the busiest years in the business, with recent roles on two big acquisitions worth a combined $100 billion: Actavis’s $66 billion agreement to buy Allergan and Halliburton’s $34.6 billion planned purchase of Baker Hughes. On the other end of the spectrum, boutique advisory firms have also benefited seeing their share of U.S. M&A fees increased to 16%, up from just 8% in 2008.

The deal making may not slow down soon and could last at least another six to 12 months, says Joseph Perella, Chairman of investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners. How could CEOs and boards get prepared to ride the M&A wave? How can they become predators rather than prey? Golden Networking’s Mergers and Acquisitions Conference 2015 New York City, Will Wall Street’s Mega-deal Boom Keep Breaking Trillion-dollar Records in 2015?, will bring the answers for the industry’s most pressing questions.

Mergers and Acquisitions Conference 2015 New York City is the first (and only) forum top executives, bankers, lawyers and investors need to attend to start 2015 off with a bang. Savvy deal makers, renowned investors and inquisitive experts will bring their latest thinking to hundreds of senior business focused on leveraging low-interest rates in America and Europe and their immense piles of cash on hand while scoring strategic touchdowns that will build decades-long advantages:

• Mr. Alex Hecker, Co-head of Consumer and Retail M&A, Lazard
• Mr. Antonio Weiss, Head of Investment Banking, Lazard
• Ms. Barbara Byrne, Vice Chairman, Investment Banking, Barclays
• Mr. Brent Saunders, Chief Executive Officer, Actavis
• Ms. Caroline Silver, Managing Director, Moelis & Co.
• Mr. Craig Moffett, Analyst, Sanford Bernstein
• Mr. David Fox, Partner, Kirkland & Ellis
• Ms. Elinor Hoover, Vice Chairman of Capital Markets Origination and Global Co-Head of Financial Strategies and Solutions, Citigroup
• Ms. Elizabeth Myers, Head of Global Equity Capital Markets, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
• Mr. Jeff Liu, Global Technology Industry Transaction Advisory Services Leader, Ernst & Young
• Mr. John Malone, Chairman, Liberty Interactive Corporation
• Mr. Joseph Perella, Chairman and Founding Partner, Perella Weinberg Partners
• Ms. Katia Bouazza, Co-Head of Global Capital Markets for the Americas, HSBC Securities
• Mr. Ken Jacobs, Chief Executive Officer, Lazard
• Mr. Kenton King, Partner, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP
• Ms. Lisa Pollina, Vice Chairman, RBC Capital Markets
• Ms. Lynn Tilton, Chief Executive Officer, Patriarch Partners LLC
• Ms. Marianne Lake, Chief Financial Officer, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
• Mr. Mark Zandi, Chief Economist, Moody's Analytics
• Professor Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, Professor, Harvard Business School
• Ms. Rebecca Patterson, Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer, Bessemer Trust
• Mr. Richard Kinder, Chairman, Kinder Morgan Energy Partners
• Mr. Roger Altman, Chief Executive Officer, Evercore
• Ms. Safra Catz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Oracle Corporation
• Mr. Sam Zell, Chairman, Equity Group Investments
• Mr. Scott Bok, Chief Executive Officer, Greenhill
• Ms. Tracy Britt Cool, Chief Executive Officer, The Pampered Chef
• Mr. Wilbur Ross, Chairman, WL Ross & Co.

Topics that Mergers and Acquisitions Conference 2015 will discuss include:

• Is the latest resurgence of deal making activity the real thing?
• New rules for corporate tax inversions and the impact on pending deals
• The role of private equity and the activist hedge fund in M&A
• Pharma’s Gordian knot: How to fill in gaps in their product offerings
• Telecom M&A: More of a baby’s head on a monkey’s body?
• Will megatrends driving tech M&A defy uncertainty about the global economy?
• Is today’s M&A boom going to end badly?

 
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