In November of last year, the newswires were aflutter with the possibility of breaking 2000's merger and acquisition amounts.

According to The Economist, the total global value of mergers and acquisitions in 2006 (also known as M&A activity) was about $4 trillion, $500 billion more than the $3.5 trillion total deals completed in 2000.

Now there's even more news coming out about the industry…

Bloomberg announced this morning that Wachovia Corp. (WB:NYSE) and Regions Financial Corp. (RF:NYSE) “probably led fourth-quarter profit growth for U.S. regional banks after making two of the industry's biggest acquisitions last year.”

Wachovia acquired Golden West Financial Corp. for $24.2 billion last year prompting an earnings gain of 27% due to a jump in mortgages.

Regions Financial bought AmSouth Bancorp for $10.5 billion resulting in a 65% jump in profits for the acquirer.

These acquisitions helped certain banking companies even after funding costs dug their fingers into profits due to the Fed's rate increases.

Merrill Lynch & Company concludes that the 12 major regional banks in the industry saw only growth of 6.1% in the fourth quarter of 2006, the lowest seen since the first quarter of 2005.

According to The McKinsey Quarterly companies across the board are getting better at M&A activity, and shareholders are getting more to show for it.

According to its article on M&A:

“In the earlier M&A boom, the market judged that in more than two-thirds of the deals, all of the value created went to the target companies' shareholders. This time, however, shareholders of acquiring companies appear to be keeping more of that value, as measured by the lower proportion of acquirers that the market believes to be overpaying for deals. In the current boom, the proportion overpaying has averaged 57 percent, decreasing annually from 63 percent in 2003 to 56 percent in 2006.”

It's just the beginning of the year and we've already seen some great deals.

A&T Inc.'s (T:NYSE) acquisition of Bell South Corporation (BLS:NYSE) and its Cingular Wireless brand is already in action. AT&T is phasing out the use of Cingular as a brand name and replacing it with its own.

Yesterday, we also heard of what's called a vertical merger: eBay Inc. (EBAY:NASDAQ) will buy StubHub, an online ticket seller that grossed $400 million in revenue last year. This eliminated competition for eBay in the way of concert and sports event ticket sales, and is one of the smartest M&A's I've heard of this year. (Much better than eBay's Skype acquisition.)

Heed this: With last year's M&A activity success, 2007 will be the year. You're going to see countless companies doing the “in thing” -- consolidating competition and building better companies in booming industries from the ground up.