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What a difference a year makes. While worries over Y2K compatibility were supposed to chill merger activity at the end of 1999, the market evidently didn't agree, and in the end, booming stock prices and the rush to do one more pooling kept the deals coming. Fast-forward to December 2000. Though total deal value for the fourth quarter 2000 is skewed by the gargantuan J.P. Morgan & Co./Chase Manhattan merger (valued at $34 billion), Kathleen Smythe, managing director and head of banking at Putnam Lovell deGuardiola & Thornton, points out that by comparison, the last half of 2000 was slow. From July to December there were 121 deals announced, compared to 173 during the same six-month period one year earlier.
Though concerns about the elimination of pooling accounting may have nixed some deals later in 2000, new accounting proposals may well...