On December 22, Mr. Aquila appeared on Bloomberg Markets with Bloomberg's Jeffrey McCracken and Betty Liu to discuss why 2015 was a record-breaking year for M&A, as well as what their predictions are for activity in 2016. “There was a lot of pent-up demand. There was not a lot of M&A activity really from 2008 until about 2013, and it only really got started in the second half of 2014,” Mr. Aquila said. “In addition to debt availability and low growth, you also have companies that have a lot of cash on their balance sheets, and a lot of U.S. companies that have a lot of non-U.S. cash on their balance sheets that they can deploy in acquisitions outside of the U.S., probably about $2 trillion.”