NEWSLETTER of February 6, 2026

The following content has been added at finexpert:

PwC
29TH GLOBAL CEO SURVEY
It’s often said that successful leaders need both a microscope and a telescope to help them identify near-term threats while spotting long-term opportunities. This tension across time horizons is a recurring theme in PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey, based on responses from 4,454 chief executives across 95 countries and territories. In the year ahead, CEOs see a world beset by challenges. They’ve grown significantly less confident about the short-term growth outlook for their companies and more worried about a range of threats, including macroeconomic volatility, cyber risk, and geopolitical conflict. At the same time, they’re focusing on multiyear opportunities to reinvent the business. CEOs are forging ahead with investment in AI even though immediate returns are often elusive. They’re prioritising innovation. And many are entering new sectors as they lean into a reconfiguration of industries that’s reshaping the global economy. >more

Bank for International Settlements
FINANCING THE AI BOOM: FROM CASH FLOWS TO DEBT
Investment related to artificial intelligence (AI) is surging – both in nominal amounts and as a share of GDP – and currently accounts for a substantial share of economic growth. The size of anticipated investment needs will require firms to shift the source of financing from operating cash flows to debt, with private credit playing a rapidly increasing role. While macroeconomic and financial stability risks from the AI boom appear moderate, the boom's sustainability hinges on AI firms meeting high earnings expectations. The fact that equity prices have run far ahead of debt market pricing underscores this tension. >more

Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft
HERAUSFORDERUNGEN UND PERSPEKTIVEN FÜR DIE LANGFRISTFINANZIERUNG
Private companies will have to invest billions of euros by 2045 to make the economy climate-neutral. However, in a study, scientists at the German Economic Institute (IW) warn that financing threatens to fail due to the banks' equity capital limits. In order to secure the additional credit demand for the climate-neutral transformation of the economy, European credit institutions would have to build up an additional €867 billion in equity capital by 2045 under current rules. This corresponds to an increase of around 44 percent, as shown by an IW study commissioned by the Association of German Pfandbrief Banks (VDP). If equity capital remained at today's level, the equity ratio would fall from 19.3 percent in 2024 to 13.5. >more

Bain & Company
M&A REPORT 2026
In 2025, deal value rose dramatically to deliver the second-highest year on record in a broad-based rebound that spanned all industries. Behind this resurgence is the urgent need for companies to reinvent themselves to get out ahead of the big forces of technology disruption, a post-globalization economy, and shifting profit pools. But whether companies are turning to M&A to gain capabilities that give them a competitive edge in the AI revolution, create the agility required to succeed in post-globalization’s fragmented markets, or pursue new sources of growth in rapidly changing industries, they now can draw on new tools and approaches to hasten value creation. >more

ARE PRIVATE AND PUBLIC FIRMS FRIENDS OR FOES? EVIDENCE FROM MILLIONS OF WEBPAGES
Gerard Hoberg, and Gordon M. Phillips
2025
We examine the impact of positive private firm innovation shocks and private firm liquidity shocks on existing public firm peers using an extensive dynamic textual network. We build this textual network using a LLM to analyze millions of internet webpages over time from 2000 to 2021 from the Internet WayBack Machine. We document that state-level shocks to the incentives of private firms to invest in R&D have positive effects on related public firms consistent with product market complementarities. After these innovation shocks to private peers, related public firms increase acquisitions of private firms and have improved profitability, sales growth, competitive positioning, and investments including R&D. In contrast, state-level liquidity shocks, which instead relax financing constraints of private firms located in these states, negatively impact related public firms, consistent with substitution and private firms increasing competitive pressure on public firms. These results indicate a new empirical framework and novel indications of where private firms are either complements or substitutes to larger public firms. >more

ACQUIRING SUPPLIER NETWORKS: DOMESTIC MERGERS FOR INTERNATIONAL SUPPLY CHAIN RESILIENCE
Ling Cen, Sudipto Dasgupta, Isil Erel, and Yanru Han
2025
Long-standing international supplier relationships represent valuable and hard-to-replicate intangible assets that mitigate the search and contracting frictions inherent in global value chains. We propose and show that domestic mergers and acquisitions (M&A) serve as a key strategic vehicle for acquiring these established supplier networks, providing a novel source of merger synergy. Using detailed transaction-level shipment data from 2007–2020, we find that post-merger, acquirers systematically adopt the target’s supplier relationships, with a pronounced preference for those that are long-standing. This adoption occurs for both inputs the acquirer already sources (enhancing resilience) and new inputs (facilitating expansion). Consistent with this type of synergy, the likelihood of a merger increases with the similarity of the firms’ imported input portfolios, especially during periods of heightened supply-chain risk, when the value of a target's vetted network is highest. Furthermore, these mergers generate competitive advantages through foreclosure-like effects on target rivals when their supply chains overlap with the acquirer’s, leading to improved valuations and sales growth for target firms. Overall, we show that a primary synergy in many M&As is the acquisition of “relational capital” embedded in the target’s supply chain. >more