I was hoping to revisit the "top of the market" theme once things calmed down this weekend but it would appear Lina Saigol, the Companies Editor at the Financial Times, has beaten me to the punch (this often happened to me when I was a cub M&A reporter at the The Daily Telegraph in the mid-noughties).
Her column today in the Financial Times echoes what I have been thinking all week: the last time Anheuser-Busch Inbev lot and their backers at 3G pulled the trigger on a mega deal it was pretty much the top of the last bull market.
In case you don't recall, it was Neil Hume, then a stock market correspondent at the Financial Times and pioneer of digital market reporting, who broke the story online in May 2008 on FT Alphaville about Inbev working on a $46 billion takeover bid for US-based Anheuser-Busch in what was probably one of the best M&A scoops of that decade. Here is a link:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com//2008/05/23/13297/bud-becks-inbev-targets-takeover-of-anheuser-busch/
Inbev pressed ahead with the Anheuser-Busch deal but we all know what happened in the banking sector and stock markets just a few months afterwards...
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