Will potential tax changes accelerate deal activity and closed deals in 2021?

Any tax experts here? I believe when tax regulations change, the changes are often implemented retroactively (by a bit)? If this is the case, all the articles (today's WSJ, yesterday's FT, among many others) about a surge of deals (being pulled ahead to close before any potential increase in tax rates) might be in error, as the tax reg's might get backdated to encompass 2021 deals. Thoughts/corrections?

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Anecdotally I'm already plugged in on a deal which wouldn't have come to us were it not for the threat of a tax increase. Lucky in that the originally planned buyer would take over 6 months to close for regulatory reasons, but does show that this timing matters. If it starts to look fairly certain that there would be tax increases, it will make a huge difference to post tax profit of sellers, so yeah, we're all gonna get crushed in Q3/Q4 if this goes through I bet.

 

Potentially, but I would think only for deals that are actively looking to fix tax bills. I think most deals, hopefully, are economic/business/strategic driven so the taxes won’t matter as much

 
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