The IPO of Indonesia’s GoTo is a big moment not just for the issuer but for the exchange that changed the rules to accommodate it and for the entirely domestic joint lead manager group.

Private equity’s relationship with the Spac asset class? It’s complicated.

A combination of geographical position and commodity strength is working in the country’s favour.

It looks like Chelsea bid heartbreak for the structuring team at asset manager Centricus, but football financing is a funny old game and it’s never over until the final whistle blows.

Corporates want to improve sustainability in their supply chains, but, if anything, the barriers to doing so are getting worse.

With consumer business sales mostly finalized in Asia, attention turns now to Jane Fraser’s commitment to devote the proceeds to growth in the region. We are seeing early signs.

A blunder in its exchange-traded notes business is set to cause Barclays a fresh headache that it doesn’t need.

ESG has been an intense focus for banks in recent years – not least for their communications teams. But with war in Ukraine, ESG has hit its first real test – and the talking has stopped.

Margin hikes are raising the table stakes in markets from commodities to stock loans. Margins may be a better risk signal than curiously subdued measures like the ViX index of equity volatility.

China’s approach to ESG is a jumble of grandiose and contradictory state planning alongside often marvellously successful bottom-up plans by banks and fintechs to instil in consumers a more sustainable lifestyle.

Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s new president, is seen as pro-business and pro-market reform. Bankers are delighted, but there’s also a nagging doubt that populist policies that favour retail investors over institutional have crept in to win votes.

Brazil’s banks stand firm against fintech’s rise.

What practical steps do banks have to take when a client falls foul of a sanction list?

Vaca muerta is an enormous oil and gas field, but it may be too late to exploit it.

Where do the borders of ESG lie – now and in the future? Investors from the US to China are revisiting these questions and finding thorny and often unpalatable answers, even as they dump Russian assets for ethical reasons. The results are set to shape the financial world’s relationship with sustainability for years to come.

Western governments hope Russian citizens will blame the regime of president Vladimir Putin and seek change. That is a gamble.

In just a few years, the New Eurasian Land Bridge, which conveys rail freight between China and Europe, became a key part of Beijing’s fading Belt and Road Initiative. Thanks to sanctions levied against state operator Russian Railways, that vital trade link threatens to be disrupted – and possibly severed.

Decades of work have been put into building Russia’s financial system. Putin’s war is destroying it overnight.

Russians could try to use cryptocurrencies to dodge sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine, but a move into the mainstream by crypto exchange heads hungry for fiat currency wealth will complicate evasion tactics.

Energy price volatility driven by war in Ukraine could deliver a windfall to banks such as Goldman Sachs that retain scale in commodity trading. Profits from dealing can also be made without triggering ESG or sanctions-related pain.

Why do Saudi Arabia and Malaysia still overwhelm every other state in Islamic asset management?

The spectre of 2003’s global research settlement is looming over the world of equity block trades.

It’s rare to see a sovereign fund backing a digital bank before its launch.

Until recently, poor nations joined the Belt and Road Initiative to secure access to funds flowing to the vast infrastructure project. Then the funds started to dry up. Does this presage a full-scale financial pull-back from the world by China?

Toshiba has unveiled a new restructuring format, but its roster of activist shareholders would much prefer the business be taken private.

For four years, a criminal case brought by an Australian regulator against Citi, Deutsche Bank, ANZ and six bankers who were facing jail has looked ill-judged, acting retrospectively against common market practice in a share placement. Now it has collapsed and lessons need to be learned

SoftBank’s likely choice of the US to list Arm might say something about UK equity investor culture, but using it as evidence that London reform efforts are failing is a step too far.

Share buybacks are suddenly commonplace in European banking, as supervisors are more wary about touching dividends – and because banks lack better use for their new capital surpluses.

The first month of 2022 has seen not so much a mean reversion as a collapse in investment banking revenues. Investors must hope this won’t continue.

The rationale behind a bank buyback can be different in emerging versus developed markets.