Corporate deals hit a near-record $200 billion this month as CEOs battle Amazon, Facebook, Google and others

Investment bankers have gotten used to being asked by worried retail-industry chief executives to pitch takeover ideas aimed at fending off Amazon. Now the fear has spread to media, health care and many other sectors, where CEOs dread the breathtaking competitive advancements made by not just Amazon but also Facebook, Google and Netflix. The result is an explosion of mergers and acquisitions. So far in Nov 2017, about $200 billion of deals have been announced in the US, according to Dealogic. November is on pace to be the second-biggest deal-making month since the firm began tracking them in 1995.

Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chief executive, said, “Tech companies are spending billions creating content and distributing it directly to consumers.” AT&T’s planned purchase “gives Time Warner the opportunity to do the same, across multiple platforms and with ad-supported models that cost consumers less.”