At the end of 2024, as interest rates and inflation were dropping, private equity dry powder was piling up and a new president who many thought would be business-friendly was preparing to return to Washington, businesses, banks and analysts thought this would be a huge year for M&A transactions.

We all know what happened instead. President Donald Trump’s second term has been full of new ideas on the economy: Tariffs on nearly every country with percentages and effective dates that for months seemed to change by the day, canceled incentives and federal grants from the previous administration, and a domestic economy that has often frozen in place because nobody is sure what to expect next.

But M&A hasn’t stopped altogether. A mid-year trend report from PwC Global found that while the number of M&A deals in the first half of 2025 was down 9% year-over-year, deal values were up 15%. And while three in 10 U.S. companies had paused or revisited pending deals this spring, PwC found that 51% were still pursuing deals.

This month, many of Trump’s new tariffs have solidified and are actually being collected. The recently passed so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” also puts in place financial policy for the next several years. No matter how good or bad that is for companies, it gives them something that’s been elusive so far this year: A baseline to work from in making financial projections. And while finance professionals and analysts say that companies are still approaching transactions with great care, the M&A doors are reopening.

Today’s Forbes CFO newsletter focuses on today’s M&A market: What the landscape looks like, who should be making deals, and what companies approaching the buy and sell markets should do. I spoke with two M&A experts and advisers—Bill Haemmerle, partner in the transaction advisory service practice at Wiss & Company; and Scott Mozarsky, co-CEO and managing director of M&A advisory firm JEGI LEONIS—about it, and their comments are throughout this newsletter.

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Since the beginning of the year, many companies that had been interested in deals just seemed to put things on hold, according to Haemmerle. He currently works with lower middle market companies, and many of the potential deals........

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