No bank shaped the North American market the way Morgan Stanley did in 2025. Across M&A, ECM and DCM, the firm wasn’t simply present on the region’s most important transactions, it was the architect behind them: completing 229 M&A deals in the Americas, leading more equity offerings and IPOs than any rival, and posting the largest DCM revenue gain of any global peer.
In M&A, the franchise’s signature was judgement under pressure rather than scale for its own sake. Tom Miles, co-head of the global business, explains the firm’s philosophy: “I think about it as the number of really differentiated outcomes that we can deliver for our clients.”
That showed in the sale of TJC’s portfolio company, Silvus Technologies to Motorola Solutions for $5 billion, a deal that could have been impacted on price had Morgan Stanley chosen to run a faster process. The same instinct carried the firm through Chevron’s acquisition of Hess Corporation for $60 billion, Howard Hughes’ defence against Pershing Square’s unsolicited offer, and the $8 billion Spirit AeroSystems’s sale to Boeing, which Miles called “the most interesting deal I’ve ever done” in 32 years in business.
I think about [our philosophy] as the number of really differentiated outcomes that we can deliver for our clients
Tom Miles
ECM told the same story of leadership rather than participation. Morgan Stanley led Medline’s record $7.2billion IPO, the largest in the US in 2025, and dominated the convertible market with landmark offerings for KKR, CoreWeave and Strategy.
Breaking new ground
The firm also pioneered an entirely new structure, the ‘private IPO’, to deliver public-market discipline to companies like HUB that were not ready to list and led roughly $11 billion in equity raises for some of the region’s most prominent private companies.
In debt capital markets, Morgan Stanley’s edge was foresight. Teddy Hodgson, who runs global investment grade DCM, explains: “We’ve been ahead of the pack in terms of spotting the opportunities and trends” – particularly with respect to AI and digital infrastructure. That positioning delivered the $27 billion Meta/Blue Owl structured joint venture which included a record issuance of $27.3 billion of debt by Blue Owl’s acquisition vehicle, alongside landmark raises for Alphabet, Amazon and xAI.
Cody Gunsch, who oversees leveraged finance capital markets, described the broader culture behind it. “It’s having the years and decades of experience of what does the market want to buy… we’re making new markets. We’re breaking new ground,” he says. The firm ranked first in global bridge loans, gained over 220 basis points of US investment-grade market share, and advised on five of the eight largest structured joint ventures in the US, more than any competitor.
What unites all these businesses is conviction over scale. Morgan Stanley’s senior bankers have spent careers, not years, at the firm and its clients, from KKR to Chevron to TJC, return because of that continuity – which repeatedly and consistently delivers the best outcome not just the available one.
