As companies and investors head into the home stretch before years end, what are their key concerns about the global economy, markets, and the deal-making environment?

When you look at the global economy, it's not performing in lockstep. There are big differences between how the

U.S. Europe, Asia, China specifically are performing at the moment, and so our corporate clients are having to navigate a much trickier

and a much more fragile global economy compared to prior years.

I'm Allison Nathan and this is Goldman Sachs exchanges. For today's episode, I'm sitting down with Jim F. Vizito, co-head of Goldman Sachs's global banking and markets, for his perspective on how companies and investing clients are approaching opportunities in the current

economic climate.

Jim, welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me.

Jim, you have an interesting and I would say pretty rare vantage point at Goldman Sachs because you spend time with all sorts of clients,

companies, private equity firms, a range of institutional investors.

So at a high level, what would you say is top of mind for each of these types of clients right now?

It's a good place to start, Allison, because I think there are definitely differences amongst our clients, much like in politics.

Where you stand depends upon where you sit. So let's take each

client constituency in kind and I'll start with private equity. I think it's important to

bear in mind over the past 10 years the private equity industry has grown

exponentially when you look at assets under management. The past decade of

zero rates, ample and cheap funding and liquidity was very kind to the private

equity industry. A decade ago, private equity would have accounted for about 20% of the global merger volumes.

This past year it was closer to 40%.

So private equity is a huge accelerant

in deal-making and the capital markets. Now the obvious issue right now is we're

coming off a period where the IPO market was very anemic. Financing

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