Welcome to our exchanges at Goldman Sachs markets update for Friday April 9th.

Each week we check them at the leader across the firm to get a quick take on what they're

watching in the markets. This week we're going to look at the surge in IPO and related equity issuance and the outlook for markets going forward. I'm Jake Stewart Globalhead of Corporate Communications here at Goldman and I'm

delighted to be joined by Benny Adler who's a legend co-head of America's

franchise trading. Benny nice to see you and welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me. So it's been a busy, busy year for you.

We've seen a record level of IPOs and SPACs in the market this year.

Give us a sense of the scale of activity that you've been seeing? Yeah, sure.

And look, it's really been a slow build to the crescendo that's happening in Q1.

I really described the whole last 12 months

is a profound reallocation of capital throughout our economy that's largely flowed through equity capital markets.

But the first quarter has really been unprecedented in terms of the level of activity.

So, you know, to put some numbers around just over 250 billion dollars of registered equity paper came to the market in the U.S. in the first quarter.

That would be a slightly below average year over the last decade, full year.

You know, what really stands out in that number of 250 billion are two

categories. The first are IPOs of operating companies. These are the traditional

IPOs that we all know and get a lot of press. 40 billion dollars of

operating company IPOs in the first quarter.

A full year average over the last decade is 51 billion. So really, really extraordinary levels of activity

for a single quarter. Even more extraordinary is the level of issuance in

SPACs. There were 95 billion of IPO dollars raised by SPACs in the first

quarter. That compares to 83 billion dollars last year for the entire year,

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