Merger activity increased last week with two new deals announced and five pending deals closing. Several deals with large spreads on account of regulatory hurdles including Bayer's acquisition of Monsanto, AT&T's (T) acquisition of Time Warner and China Oceanwide's acquisition of Genworth (GNW) recently managed to get past those hurdles.
For a while last week it looked like Qualcomm's (QCOM) acquisition of NXP Semiconductors (NXPI) would get past its last hurdle of approval by Chinese regulators but then it turned out that celebrations were premature. There were three semiconductor deals with large spreads a