rohit if you believe jay powell theres no recession if you believe traders that were close to the end of the tightening cycle then that can only be good news for m  a is it is indeed now im starting to feel quite positive that while volumes were down earlier in the first half of this year that the second half of the year we are starting to see activity deal conversations pick up and frankly in a business that runs on confidence if you are starting to sight the end of that rate hike curve and if youre off the view that the fed will indeed engineer a soft landing for the economy then now that creates a confidence around the outlook for the businesses that should be positive for my business but confidence can be wrought especially by geopolitics were seeing us tensions rising and not abating at all that could derail everything too yeah no there is definitely murkiness and in the macro environment you got a war youve got geopolitics you got still the specter of inflation and input costs commodity prices so theres plenty of things that we still need to be watchful for but having said that businesses are constantly having to reassess their strategies now their allocation of capital their areas of growth so i think the moment you start to feel as though youre in a place where the next two or three years of outlook you can get some conviction around i think the deal volumes will go up what about rising interest rates and we saw what the fed did now the thing is the end of free money must be impacting the m  a space is it and to what extent so yes the cost of capital having become as expensive as it has is definitely impacting appetite for a leveraged buyout it is also creating distortions between the expectations of sell side and buy side on valuation but once the the actual access to liquidity improves and once the once people are convinced that we are at a particular stable place place on interest rates i think that business will start to get back there does need to be a period of time when the buyer and seller that i know and expectations of of of value but otherwise there is an enormous amount of capital that is on the sidelines looking for opportunities to come back in so that brings me nicely just to ask you about you know what are we talking about which countries which are the industry groups which may be disparate and ripe for consolidation and what are you looking at in particular within those industry groups themselves and im talking about of course the region right so if you just look at asiapacific more broadly there a different team playing out in each of the markets in australia its consolidation around natural resources in india its around tech services in korea and japan there is a lot of activity in industrials and health care in southeast asia its a combination of industrials telecom financial institutions this domestic consolidation in many of these industries as people are trying to figure out what the benefits of scale are and how to engineer scale and allocation of capital into the into the sectors that they consider priority you didnt mention china whats the landscape looking like so china we are we are having to assess very carefully what the opportunities are it used to be a big outbound market that that appetite has moderated its still there in certain select industrial sectors in healthcare but the overall scrutiny that outbound investments from china will be put through means that that outbound volume has moderated so a lot of our current focus in china is on domestic transactions that are of course subject to now regulatory approvals and policy point of view and also trying to see if multinational companies that are operating in that market need to be considering actively what choices they have for the next stage of their growth whether its their joint ventures whether it is through bringing in local investors whether it is through merging with a domestic corporate whether it is even also listing the businesses on the asia market what is the right legal form what is the right route to market for the next stage of the growth we know that the big banks one full ownership in china do you see them pushing through that any time soon well i think all of us as investment banks have been given the ability to now be in full control of our operations that allows us to deliver better and more seamlessly the product suite that our clients operating in that market will need of us right what about geopolitics and the rejigging of supply chains and perhaps some of these multinational companies which are divesting in some parts of the region what are you seeing there so geopolitics is definitely one that a lot of clients are watching now because it has implications for the ability to grow their businesses in china it has implications for how the supply chain in china continues to be embedded within the global businesses and it has also implications for whether within the current policy framework that they operate in in china whether their growth outlook in some shape or form will need to be adjusted for the current realities so with all of those they are going to have to focus on whether they have the right go to market strategy whether they have the right partnerships whether they have the right legal structures that is a reality that we are helping clients assess yeah absolutely and you know we look at different legal structures that brings me nicely to say what about crossborder mergers what are you seeing there to crossborder mergers out of asia have typically been for cash now theyve been mostly acquisitions rather than true mergers but we are starting to see like we did in australia earlier this year crossborder mergers for stock as the deals get larger and as the cost of debt is more expensive now we may see more of these stock for stock combinations in certain global industries that operate globally and where investors are able to take a holistic view about how the business is being listed in more than one jurisdiction weve seen that in in australia weve also seen that in japan we havent seen much of it anywhere else but i think in japan in australia we may see more of those rates coming