Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
The closing decades of the twentieth century saw the predatory M&A culture at its zenith. Hostile takeovers, poison pills, Pac-Man defences, greenmail, activist investors, white knights, black knights and bidding wars were the order of the day, at a time when the American markets were on a major bull run. And then, somewhere along the way, after the East Asian financial crisis, the Dotcom Bubble and the Financial Crisis that spanned the last and first decades of the twentieth and twenty first centuries respectively, the world of M&A suddenly became a less exciting place to live in. Hostile takeovers lost their flavour, companies built up their defences, shareholder activism gained prominence in the wake of sloppy results at several companies and private equiteers preferred working with managements rather than trying to depose them, even as the world grappled with increased uncertainty over the past decade. But now, with the global markets gaining steam, big-ticket M&