2016 looks to be a year of cancelled corporate mergers

New York

WHILE last year set a record for the amount of money spent on corporate mergers - US$4.7 trillion - this year is so far setting a very different record: the dollar amount of deals that have come undone.

Since the beginning of January, US$400 billion worth of corporate mergers have been withdrawn in the US, almost three times the previous record for the same period, set in 2007, according to Dealogic, which analyses such data.