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By Adam Reinebach

Reinebach: Know Your Market

August 11, 2008 - When reaching out to or dealing with corporate dealmakers, a targeted message is paramount.

Corporate Dealmakers

August 4, 2008 - If you’re shopping a healthcare company and want to find a few private equity professionals or investment bankers who focus on this area, it won’t take long to get started. Type in the right phrases on a search engine like Google, or search a news-rich site like www.mergersunleashed.com, and within seconds you’re looking at relevant results.

Marriages & Mergers

July 23, 2008 - Despite all the work that goes into planning a wedding and booking a nice honeymoon, anyone who has ever been married knows that the front end of the marriage is the easy part. The hard part, of course, is what comes after: Sharing bank accounts, working on house projects together, having children, and of course determining who gets the remote. The same holds true in the M&A world, where the real work begins after the acquisition.…

What Banks Need Now

July 21, 2008 - Whether it’s covered bonds, short-selling restrictions or propping up Fannie and Freddie, the federal government has been playing an active role in trying to stabilize the financial markets. Some would argue they’re not doing enough, while others want to put the brakes on this type of intervention, fearful that these actions will lead to unwarranted and inefficient regulation.

PE Firms Wearing Several Hats

June 23, 2008 - Deal sourcing. Fund raising. Preparing companies for exit. Buying champagne. Those were some of the key tasks for private equity firms during the not-so-long-ago boom years.

Headline Risk

June 2, 2008 - A

As quickly as many in the financial media declared the LBO market dead a few months ago, business news sites are now suddenly full of pronouncements that private equity is back, baby! Perhaps fatigued by months of negativity, reporters seem to be latching onto every sign that M&A activity is improving—from optimistic comments at M&A events to general partners who aren’t returning phone calls to reporters as quickly as they used to.

Foreign Concept

April 23, 2008 - At least on paper, the conditions for foreign buyers interested in U.S. targets couldn’t be more auspicious. The dollar is weak, M&A financing is harder to come by for financial sponsors, and many strategic buyers in the States are hard-pressed to make acquisitions at a time when earnings targets are being missed.

Post-Crunch M&A

April 21, 2008 - No matter how challenging the deal market becomes, it’s a sure bet there will be folks, funds and firms who find ways to benefit from the down cycle.

Networking in a Down Market

April 8, 2008 - A couple months ago, I had the pleasure of attending the American Securitization Forum’s annual conference in Las Vegas, one of the asset-backed securities market’s premier events.

Where Retirement and M&A Meet

March 25, 2008 - With scores of Baby Boomers approaching retirement, it’s easy to see why the Prudentials and Fidelitys of the world have been developing new products that provide retirement income. But mid-market dealmakers ought to be just as excited.

The Case for Awards & InterGrowth

March 7, 2008 - At first glance, spring 2008 might seem an odd time to recognize M&A deals in the middle market. The mid-market continues to be active, but the exercise of doing deals is both more challenging and expensive.

Beware of the Big Boys

January 15, 2008 - Don’t be shocked if a mega buyout firm is competing with you for your next mid-market deal.

Why I'm Still In Love With The Mid-Market

December 5, 2007 - In a market that has been derailed by the subprime mortgage debacle, multibillion-dollar losses from major Wall Street firms and a pervasive sense of uncertainty, one segment of the capital markets continues to chug along with remarkable stamina: middle market M&A.

Avoiding The Glare of the Public Spotlight

December 6, 2007 - Upon first glance at that headline, it was tough for me to feel much sympathy for a guy whose firm made such bad bets on the mortgage market while collecting an eye-popping salary. According to Forbes.com, O’Neal’s total cash compensation last year was $91 million, while his anticipated severance package has been estimated at $159 million—an amount that exceeds the total value of many mid-market mergers. Now in his mid-fifties, O’Neal could retire quite comfortably on that sum.

News Flash: Banks & Sponsors Not Filing For Divorce

December 13, 2007 - Yesterday I read an abstract in a competing publication that read as follows:

The twilight struggle between banks and buyout shops over financing commitments has produced tense moments and obscure legal quibbling. But so far at least, the parties are still talking.

Wow, the parties are still talking? Thanks for the revelation.

Five Reasons Not To Panic

December 6, 2007 - Being the informed professionals that you are, I’ll assume that everyone who reads Merger Mogul is acutely aware of the ongoing credit crunch that began with subprime mortgage lending woes and most recently jumped across the pond to infect select Europeans. To put it in perspective, I typed in the phrase ‘credit crunch’ yesterday on Google News and got almost 13,000 hits, which is, impressively, more than double the hits for the phrase ‘Britney Spears’.

The Sky Isn't Falling

December 6, 2007 - Following O.J. Trial-like coverage of Blackstone’s IPO, the debate about private equity taxation and seemingly endless analysis of how rich and powerful the mega buyout firms are, perhaps it’s only natural to see people overreact to the recent hiccup in the credit markets. And it’s not just the average Joe who thinks this way. Last week, an insightful, Harvard-educated colleague of mine walked into my office to ask what I thought about the LBO party coming to a close.

When Multi-Tasking Leads To Poor Decisions

January 16, 2008 - Back in the mid-1990s, when I first started covering capital markets, the period of late July to Labor Day was the absolute worst time to be a reporter. Bankers started taking their annual vacations, the deal pipeline started to shrink, and it was tough to find contacts actually in their office to speak to you.