EL7 Research · Deals DeskPublished 19 August 2026

Four deals in 48 hours 30-year Treasury yield 5.33% — highest since 2007 Norfolk Southern deal spread ~14%

Four deals in 48 hours despite the most expensive money since 2007: who pays cash and who pays stock?

Over two days in which long-term borrowing costs reached levels not seen for decades, four major takeover transactions were announced or saw significant developments at once. This research dissects the financing structure of each deal and reads the market’s assessment of their completion prospects from the spreads recorded in the EL7 database.

Executive summary

17 and 18 August 2026 presented an apparent paradox: the 30-year US Treasury yield touched 5.333%, its highest level since 2007. At the same time, four takeover deals moved in 48 hours: JBS’s offer to acquire all Pilgrim's Pride shares, the resumption of the regulatory review of the 85 billion Union Pacific–Norfolk Southern merger, Curaleaf’s launch of its formal offer to buy Aurora Cannabis, and the intensification of the Bidding War for Japan’s Kakaku.com.

The resolution to the paradox lies in financing structure, not in ignoring the impact of rates: the JBS transaction is paid entirely in stock (with no cash component), and the cash component of Curaleaf’s offer is no more than ~46 million dollars out of a total value of about 247 million dollars. The only transaction requiring a large cash component — about 20 billion dollars in the rail merger — was signed on its terms in July 2025 before the latest rise in yields, while the all-cash transaction (Kakaku.com at about 3.76 billion dollars) is denominated in Japanese yen, the lowest-cost borrowing currency in the developed world, despite its 10-year government bond yield reaching a 30-year high.

Deal spreads in the EL7 database clearly classify completion risk: Pilgrim's Pride trades only about 2% below the offer’s implied value, Aurora Cannabis trades about 9% below the 4-dollar offer, while Norfolk Southern trades about 13% below the deal’s implied value — a discount reflecting the market’s pricing of a lengthy regulatory path through early 2027.

Deals Desk — 17–18 August 2026

Each file is stamped with the cash proportion of its consideration — and the scale on the left recalls the cost of that cash

Sources: EL7 news coverage of the four deals (17–19 August 2026)el7.ai · 19 AUG 2026

Figure 1 — Four files on one desk, ordered by the cash proportion of each deal’s consideration. The sole fully cash-funded deal is financed in Japanese yen, where borrowing costs remain below those in the US despite reaching a 30-year high. Cash ratios are calculated from announced offer terms (~).

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