This is Exhings, the Goldman Sachs, where we discuss developments currently shaping markets, industries, and the global economy.

I'm Jake Stewart, Global Head of Corporate Communications here at the firm.

Today we're talking about the latest in SPACs and whether that Hot Street can continue through 2021.

We're joined by Olympia McNerney of our Equity Capital Markets and

Alternative Capital Markets group in our Investment Banking Division.

Olympia, welcome back to the program.

Thanks for having me, Jake.

So let's start by looking back.

Last year was a banner year for SPACs.

They represented a huge amount of the IPO volume in 2020.

We saw what was once a bit of an outlier of a product in capital

markets start to dominate the markets and it happened overnight. So what were the factors that

contributed to 2020 activity volumes and why SPACs in particular sort of took the spotlight.

Yeah, it's a great question and it's one that we continue to get over and over,

what's going on, why has the market change,

is this here to stay?

Just to put it into context, I mean,

there were north of 200 IPOs priced last year for SPACS alone, more than $100 billion of capital raised.

Today there are more than 250 SPACs on the hunt, and when you multiply that capital that's been raised and what could be

deployed to M&A it could potentially represent more than 500 billion dollars of

M&A so clearly this is something that is going to change the landscape not just for companies coming public but also in

M&A over the next two years. So it's really interesting to see how this has exploded in particular over the last 12 months like we've never seen before.

...