The 37th Annual Tulane Corporate Law Institute conference — a.k.a., the “Davos for Dealmaking,” as Andrew Ross Sorkin once dubbed it — begins today.

Only this year, there’s not much dealmaking to talk about down in New Orleans. Which means there’s a lot for the industry’s top bankers, lawyers, advisers, and other practitioners to talk about. The big question of the conference: Why isn’t 2025 seeing the mergers and acquisitions revival everyone expected?

The Not-So Big Easy Economy

Call it a vibe shift. Or maybe even vibe schizophrenia. Back in December, Wall Street was ecstatic about the deal-friendly environment that the Trump 2.0 administration was expected to usher in. Bankers expected deal volume to reach $4 trillion this year, up from around $3.45 trillion in 2024, per Dealogic data, and a return to the pre-President Biden, pre-Lina Khan era of much more relaxed antitrust enforcement at the FTC and DoJ. The Las Vegas Elvis Wedding Chapel for rainmakers would soon be open for business, they thought.

But two months into the Trump administration, the excitement has fizzled. This year has seen the quietest January and February for dealmaking since the financial crisis. Last week, analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods even downgraded their assessment of Goldman Sachs shares, noting the dearth of deals could hurt the investment bank’s bottom line. If anything, uncertainty has surpassed excitement as the buzzword among dealmakers:

• With the tumultuous arrival of tariffs and a trade war, dealmaking has been forced to take a backseat as business leaders prioritize navigating a rocky new landscape, EY noted in its latest M&A activity insights report.
• There are real, tangible examples of the trade war’s chilling effect, too: According to a Reuters report on Wednesday, one private equity firm backed off plans to acquire a snack-maker and merge it with a Canadian rival in light of the trade war. Another source told Reuters that a $1 billion aerospace conglomerate cooled on plans to sell itself amid the new tariffs.

According to Dealogic, just 1,603 deals have been signed this year through Friday, down 19% year-over-year, while total deal volume has fallen to $248.78 billion, down 29% year-over-year.

Private Practice: There is one bright spot in the dealmaking ecosystem: private equity, which is still sitting on some $1.2 trillion in dry powder. In a report on the PE industry published Monday, Bain & Company analysts said “dealmaking appears to have turned the corner,” pointing to a strong bounceback in both investments and exit values in 2024 that could spur momentum through the rest of this year. The downside risks this year, according to Bain? “[T]he dreaded U word (uncertainty) continues to keep markets on edge.” Yeah, we expect they’re pouring some pretty strong Sazeracs down at Tulane this year.

Novo Nordisk said on Wednesday that it’s trimming the price tag for slimmer waistlines.

The Danish pharmaceutical giant will sell its blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy for under half its normal price via a new direct-to-consumer online pharmacy. Christened NovoCare, the site will let people pay $499 per month for the weekly drug, compared with a current list price of roughly $1,350 before insurance. It follows a similar move by rival Eli Lilly as both try to extract as much profit from so-called GLP-1 drugs as possible before a run of new participants join the fray.

Feeling the Weight of Expectations

Novo suffered a brutal setback in December when its next-generation weight-loss drug candidate, CagriSema, posted weak results in a late stage trial, which led to its stock sliding 19% in one day. Meanwhile, Eli Lilly’s sales have disappointed for two consecutive quarters, and shares in both companies have retreated from record highs. Each is still trading at a relatively high price-to-earnings ratio: Eli Lilly at 67 and Novo at 27, putting them above the average P/E range of 20 to 25 and meaning some would consider them still overvalued.

And while both companies still have their landmark, billions-making weight-loss drugs — Zepbound is Eli Lilly’s Wegovy competitor — even that is no sure thing in the medium to long term. That’s because investors have poured hundreds of millions into startup biotechs working on their own obesity treatments, setting the stage for a new generation of rivals. Verdiva Bio and Kailera Therapeutics have raised $400 million apiece and Metsera, which closed an IPO last month, raised $215 million last year. Big pharma competitors also have anti-obesity drug candidates in the works. And so, with the future of a sector that Goldman Sachs says could be worth up to $100 billion by 2030 at stake, Novo and Eli Lilly have opened up discounts to expand and entrench their market share:

• NovoCare, the new online pharmacy for discounted Wegovy, follows a decision last year by Eli Lilly to launch its own direct-to-consumer online platform. LillyDirect can help patients access Zepbound prescriptions through telehealth providers and offers the drug at half (or less) of the usual $1,000 monthly price.
• After Novo and Lilly struggled to keep up with demand for their weight-loss drugs, the Food and Drug Administration declared shortages of Zepbound and Wegovy, which temporarily allowed compounding pharmacies to make and sell cheaper versions. Last month, the FDA declared both shortages over, leaving behind a new generation of customers with expectations of a lower price point.

Traditional Song: Adding more music to the ears of Wegovy shoppers, Novo said in a statement that cash-paying customers at traditional pharmacies will be able to buy the drug for the discounted rate “in the near future.”

Zero gravity doesn’t have to mean zero gains. As investors piled into EU companies deemed remotely defense-related, shares of Danish Aerospace — which sells exercise equipment for astronauts, along with other onboard equipment — shot up more than 400% in the past month and about 250% this week.

Though the small space company said its defense contracts account for only a smidge of its sales, it went supersonic after EU leaders floated measures that could boost defense spending by hundreds of billions of euros.

This Ain’t a Scene

It’s a rearmament race. Germany’s likely-next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, on Tuesday proposed a plan that could juice the country’s defense and infrastructure spending by hundreds of billions of euros. Merz plans to exempt defense spending greater than 1% of Germany’s GDP from the country’s “debt brake” (a self-imposed borrowing limit), which would be a major economic reform.

Earlier the same day, the European Commission announced a “Rearm Europe” initiative that it said could mobilize €800 billion in defense spending (first priority: provide aid to Ukraine). And last week, the UK said it’ll increase its defense budget faster than planned:

• Together, the announcements signal a shift in EU policy that would make defense spending a top priority, boosting the stocks of a slew of EU companies.
• Companies that have surged the most include Germany’s top arms manufacturer, Rheinmetall; Swedish aerospace and defense company Saab; Danish satellite maker GomSpace; and Norwegian defense-systems supplier Kongsberg Gruppen.

Meanwhile, US defense stocks have been temperamental as investors remain uncertain about the country’s spending plans. After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told WaPo the US will slash its defense budget last week, Palantir, which has several contracts with the Department of Defense to supply AI tech, had its worst day since May.

Defense-related stocks were up and down this week after Trump announced plans to withdraw aid from Ukraine, signaling the US could spend less on future conflicts.

Balancing Act: The US’s annual defense budget rings in at nearly $1 trillion, while the entire EU spent about a third of that last year. But that ratio could shift as Trump looks to cull government spending overall and his “America First” policies pull spending from abroad — leaving the EU to bulk up its budget in case the US won’t back it up in future wars. Investors simply want to be where the money goes.