Banks have announced more than $54 billion in deals through late September. That puts industry mergers and acquisitions on pace for their biggest year since 2008, when some big banks had to sell themselves to stave off collapse.

Apollo unit backs Hong Kong insurer FWD’s $3 billion U.S. IPO. Hong Kong tycoon Richard Li’s FWD Group landed a $400 million investment as part of the Asian insurer’s plans for a multibillion-dollar U.S. listing.

Invesco is in talks to merge with State Street’s asset-management business. State Street’s asset-management unit manages nearly $4 trillion in assets while Invesco oversees $1.5 trillion in assets and manages a large ETF business.

Median household income was $67,500 in 2020, down 2.9% from the prior year.

The business is growing rapidly. One group of crypto lenders has $25 billion in loans outstanding to individual and institutional clients, up from $1.4 billion a year ago.

Between Aug. 3 and Aug. 26, airlines dropped approximately 77,000 domestic flights in the United States as the Covid-19 Delta variant flared.

A group of 137 SPACs that closed mergers by mid-February have lost 25% of their combined value. At one point last month, the pullback topped $100 billion.

Direct listings have an average rise of 64.4% from their opening trading prices while the S&P 500 had a 26.8% return and the Renaissance IPO index rose 31.1%.

The top 25 private-equity firms are sitting on $509.8 billion in uninvested cash, holding 22.3% of the global dry powder total of $2.29 trillion in August. That is a significant increase from December, when the worldwide total was just under $2 trillion; in December 2019, the figure was $1.63 trillion.

Total margin debt contracted 4.3% in July, the first monthly decline in 15 months.