Chancellor Angela Merkel’s election campaign highlighted a lack of focus on the longer-term issues facing Germany, says academic Horst Opaschowski.

P2P lending is coming of age, thanks to pent-up demand for credit, new technology and new innovative providers in the market, but the jury is out on whether the sector can become a long-term viable alternative to traditional bank finance.

The revised approach to the regulation of banks’ trading books – focusing on capturing deep losses during systemic crises and a tougher approach to internal-risk modeling – will limit lucrative arbitrage and trading opportunities.

Malaysia is at growing risk of an economic bubble that could come to a sticky end as China, its largest trading partner, rebalances its economy away from a commodity-intensive investment-led growth model, analysts warn.

The European high-yield bond market has enjoyed stellar growth since 2009. Its value has risen from EUR50 billion to EUR300 billion*. We believe it has the potential to expand by half as much again to EUR450 billion in the next five years, writes Kevin Connell, Managing Director High Yield Markets, Merijn Nederveen, Managing Director, Corporate Advisory and Usman Qureshi, Corporate Advisory at RBS.

The new flexible liquidity rules will prove key to realizing Bank of England governor Mark Carney’s bold ambition to further entrench London’s status as a global financial hub while addressing the challenge of rising interest rates and a collateral shortage.

The Chinese government says it wants to transform its asset management companies – established to take on growing bad debts in the banking system – into commercially driven enterprises. In reality, a lack of transparency on portfolio loans means analysts are none the wiser as to the scale of the problem and the resolution process for legacy loans.

The UK Treasury’s courtship of Chinese banks highlights, in part, London’s relatively flexible regulatory regime for foreign banks – in contrast to the Fed. It also opens up a broader debate about subsidiarization and global banking models, more generally, amid regulatory turf wars.

Just months after the prospect of Federal Reserve tapering raised questions about the ability of some emerging market (EM) reserve managers to shore up their currencies value in the face of a resurgent dollar, stockpiles are on the rise again.

Don’t believe the doom-mongers – US political risk is not the same as US credit risk, thanks to a plethora of positive market technicals and the international monetary architecture.