Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Monday, February 16th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

International bank mergers are heating up across the EU, and carmakers are taking a $65 billion hit from a reversal in electric vehicle ambitions.

Plus, we dig into what's going on with all the weird sell-offs on Wall Street.

I get the impression that a lot of people just want to avoid parts of the market

that could randomly implode on a whim or a strange white paper issued by a former karaoke company.

I'm Victoria Craig, and here's the news you need to start your day.

Banking mergers between European Union countries hit their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis.

Rising profits and share prices in the sector have revived sluggish dealmaking, which reached

17 billion euros last year. That's a 400% increase from 2024, according to Deologic data.

Policymakers have long called for more consolidation across

the EU banking industry, but executives said regulatory hurdles and political resistance made

dealmaking difficult, that they argued caused the European sector to lose ground to U.S.

rivals. EU banking consolidation is part of a wider trend worldwide, global M&A

in the sector, more than doubled last year, according to research by McKinsey.

U.S. President Donald Trump says no one has benefited more from his drive to cut regulation than the U.S. auto industry.

Here he is at the White House just last week announcing an effective end to federal emission standards for cars and trucks.

This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically.

But the auto industry says these kinds of policy reversals have actually cost them billions of dollars,

and they're warning there's more pain ahead.

The FTs, Kana Inagaki, has been digging into the latest numbers.

She joins me now.

Hi, Kana.

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