"Fear of missing out" is the favorite narrative of people who already lost their minds.
In 2025, the world closed $4.9 trillion in mergers and acquisitions. An all-time record. It surpassed the 2021 peak — that year of printed money, zero interest rates, and collective euphoria that made everyone feel like a genius. Now in 2026, 80% of M&A executives surveyed by Bain & Company say they plan to maintain or increase their deal pace.
Eighty percent.
That's the kind of number that sounds great in a PowerPoint deck and terrifies anyone who has read Taleb.
The circus is set up, the clowns are fired up
Let me translate what's happening into plain English.
Companies came out of a turbulent 2025 — Trump tariffs, political volatility, central banks cutting rates — and rolled into 2026 carrying a dangerous mix: renewed confidence + collective FOMO syndrome.
Jake Henry, McKinsey's global head of M&A, said exactly that, just with a suit and corporate vocabulary: "The shock of trade policy turned into a less threatening pattern, the relief turned into confidence, and the confidence turned into fear of being left behind."
Direct translation: the market is buying because it's afraid of not buying. Classic.
Same script as always. Only the costumes change. In 2021 it was the infinite money narrative. Now it's the AI narrative. Artificial Intelligence has become the new oil of the 21st century — everyone wants a piece, everyone is overpaying for it, and nobody really knows what the fair price is.
Goldman Sachs topped the global M&A rankings, advising on nearly 40 deals totaling $1.48 trillion. A glorious year for anyone collecting a 1% advisory fee with zero skin in the game if things go sideways.
The detail nobody wants to face
Here's where the real problem lives — and the mainstream financial media breezes past it like it's a footnote.
The proportion of capital allocated to M&A hit its lowest level in 30 years in 2025, according to Bain itself.
Thirty years.
While deal count and total volume are smashing historical records, the money actually available to fund these deals is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Companies are routing cash toward dividends, stock buybacks, capex, and R&D. Less is left over to bet on acquisitions.
But the acquisitions are happening anyway. At record volume.
Does anyone else see the contradiction, or is it just me?
It's like playing poker with chips you don't have. The table is full, the bets are high, and most of the players are leveraged to their eyeballs. It works fine — until someone asks to see the cards.
AI as the universal excuse
Every era has its MacGuffin — that mysterious object that drives the plot without ever needing to make real sense.
In the '90s it was the internet. In the 2000s it was the American housing market. In 2021 it was SPACs and crypto. In 2026, it's AI.
I'm not saying artificial intelligence is a fraud. Far from it. I'm saying that when a technology becomes the justification for any valuation and any deal, it's time to turn on the smoke detector.
Suzanne Kumar, a Bain vice president, said companies "urgently need to reinvent themselves" to survive technological disruption and the post-globalization world. True. But reinventing yourself by making expensive acquisitions with scarce capital and stretched multiples isn't reinvention — it's desperation in a blazer.
The Boston Consulting Group's M&A sentiment index rose, but it still sits well below its historical average of 100. The very consultants selling this optimism admit the market is "improving, but cautious."
Cautious and spending $4.9 trillion at the same time.
What would Buffett do?
Warren Buffett spent all of 2024 stacking cash at Berkshire. He got to nearly $330 billion sitting idle, without making any major acquisition. Every suit-wearing analyst complained. "Buffett lost his touch." "The market left him behind."
And he kept quiet. Because someone with decades of market cycles in their memory knows that the best deal is often the one you don't make.
While the global market races into M&A driven by AI hype, FOMO, and other people's money, here's the question nobody is asking in Goldman's glossy reports:
When money gets even more expensive and the results of these acquisitions fail to materialize, who picks up the tab — the executive who approved the deal, or the shareholder who bought the narrative?
Spoiler: you already know the answer.
