Eleven articles on the adjacent fields a transaction runs through — the volume record, merger control, investment screening, deal law, accounting, tax, cross-border mechanics, process, valuation and acquisition capital.
What is on this page. A description of public rules, published data and settled market practice, with sources. It is a reference, not advice — legal, tax and accounting positions turn on facts this page cannot know. Where a figure could not be confirmed against a primary source, or where two providers disagree, the text says so rather than picking a winner. El Dorado Capital's own segment analysis and live deal work are maintained privately and are not published.
A deal is not one discipline. By the time a transaction signs it has passed through competition law, national-security law, corporate and takeover law in at least one and often several jurisdictions, tax structuring, purchase accounting, and a financing market with its own cycle — each with its own clock, its own regulator, and its own answer to what is permitted. These articles describe those fields as they actually operate, and where they differ country to country they say so specifically rather than gesturing at “local law”.
Forty years of global M&A, 1985–2025
Deal countAnnounced value, where published
The deal-count line is the one continuous, comparable series available: IMAA, compiled from Thomson Reuters/LSEG and S&P Capital IQ. The value bars are deliberately sparse. No free provider publishes a single continuous annual value series back to 1985, so each bar is whichever bank or vendor published a total for that year — meaning methodology (announced versus completed, minority stakes, currency conversion date) shifts underneath the numbers. Years with no bar are years for which no defensible figure was found; they are blank rather than estimated. The 2025 bar is the midpoint of a genuine disagreement: Bain puts the year at $4.8–4.9tn, LSEG at about $4.4tn.
The record
What actually happened, in numbers rather than adjectives.
The Volume of M&A Over Time· Forty years of deal counts and deal values, what the two measures do differently, and why every "record year" has been a smaller share of a bigger economy
Regulation
The two reviews every significant deal now runs through, and they are not the same review.
Merger Control and Antitrust Review· The competition filing: who must notify, on what clock, in how many places at once, and what a regulator can actually do about a deal it dislikes
Foreign Investment and National Security Screening· A different question from antitrust, before a different agency, on a different clock — and in several jurisdictions it reaches back years after closing
Law
Who decides whether a company is sold — and the answer changes with the target's place of incorporation.
Deal Law: the United States and the United Kingdom· Two common-law systems that answer the central question — board or shareholders — in opposite directions, and the case law each has built on that answer
Deal Law: Continental Europe and Asia· Mandatory bids, board neutrality opt-outs, co-determination, golden shares and foundation defences — the rules that make a European or Asian target a different transaction from a US one
Cross-Border M&A· What a deal acquires when it crosses a border: extra regulators, extra currencies, extra employee consultation, and a documentary record that has to work in two legal traditions at once
Numbers
The accounting and tax consequences that are settled long before anyone argues about price.
Accounting for M&A· The acquisition method, purchase price allocation, the goodwill debate, and the places where IFRS 3 and ASC 805 produce genuinely different numbers
Tax in M&A· The structural fork between shares and assets, the reorganisation rules that make a deal tax-free, and what a global minimum tax did to cross-border structuring
Execution
How the transaction is run, priced, tested and paid for.
The Deal Process and the Documents· How a transaction actually runs from mandate to escrow release, what each document does, and where the fights in each one are
Valuation, Due Diligence and Integration· The three families of valuation method and where each breaks, what diligence is actually looking for, and what the evidence says about whether acquisitions create value
Who Buys, and With What Money· The buyer taxonomy, private equity as an M&A engine, the capital stack behind a buyout, and the displacement of syndicated loans by private credit
A note on numbers
M&A has no official statistics. Every headline total is one vendor's ledger, built on its own rules about announced versus completed deals, minority stakes, terminated deals and currency conversion dates. Two reputable providers reporting the same year can disagree on the dollar total by hundreds of billions and — as they did for 2025 — on whether deal count rose or fell. Where that happens here, both figures are given with their sources. Where a figure could not be confirmed at all, the space is left empty rather than filled with an estimate that would read as fact.