Now, though, green shoots seem to be appearing in the merger market, just as they are in the economy, with Kentz the latest target in the sight. Given that, according to Dealogic which supplies the M&A data, 'risk aversion' was cited as the main reason companies have avoided dealmaking, it's very probable that the two things are related. Certainly, when UK M&A peaked, confidence - or, more accurately, hubris - was everywhere.
We all know what happened next of course, and at risk of confusing cause and effect, the exuberance that prompts large scale takeovers could be taken as a signal that markets may have run their course for the time being. And they don't come much more hubristic than the latest megadeal, the $35bn tie up between Omnicom and Publicis
Big mergers are, as I've often repeated, very hard to do and often destroy value - one only has to look at the £7bn or so recently written off as a result of the Glencore Xstrata deal. And few listed companies in the West are now so screamingly cheap that they beg to be taken over, as Invensys was earlier this year. Yet with balance sheets stuffed with cash after years of underinvestment and generously valued paper, the so-called synergies a deal brings are a much easier pill for chief execs to swallow than actually growing the business organically.
It's that generously valued paper that also seems to be stirring the IPO market back into life. For half a decade there has been no more than a comparative trickle of businesses coming to market - compare the £337m raised through flotations in the UK in the first half of 2013 to the £10bn of new money in 2006. There are suggestion now that, following news that high-end estate agent Foxtons plans to list, that trickle could turn to a flood.
Maybe it will, but investors should be asking "why now?", because in the case of Foxtons, surely the time to be getting into flogging overpriced central London properties was three years ago. Unsurprisingly, private equity are lurking in the background of this one, sensing an opportunity to get out while, with markets hovering at record highs, the going is good. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is one of several signals that now may not, more generally, be the time to be unquestionably piling in.
