New York

THERE have been 37,212 deals in 2015 - roughly one for every employee of Goldman Sachs Group Inc, the Wall Street bank that has been one of the big winners of the current merger boom.

It is a number which means that 2015 is guaranteed the title - for the next 12 months at least - of being the record year for mergers and acquisitions (M&As), with US$4.2 trillion of transactions pending or completed, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. (Deal volume for league table purposes includes M&A, stakes, joint ventures and spin-offs, though not share buybacks.) That kind of showing has provoked questions about market peaks. With 2015 demolishing M&A records, many of which predate the financial crisis, it seems right to ask: Can it possibly get better than this?