Egypt

Pension fund trustees can find equity derivatives confusing. At the NAPF conference in Edinburgh last month a baffled but brave trustee stood up to ask how he could cut through the "black art and mumbo jumbo" of these instruments.

Grigori Marchenko, governor of the National Bank of Kazakhstan, talks to Euromoney’s Guy Norton about how the Kazakh banking sector became a model for its neighbours and his plans for the future.

Commodities are on a roll as equities stumble and bonds reach their peak. But can commodity-based investments offer value for the long term as well as offering temporary relief to embattled portfolios?

Spain

The new world order, established after the fall of communism in Russia and eastern Europe, is set to shatter. Global leadership by the US confronting the USSR was succeeded by US leadership flying solo. Now comes fragmentation. The US might be the most powerful nation but over the next few years its role will be contested by China, the EU, South Korea and even Japan. This implies a much higher risk premium for financial assets.

When Mexico issued its CAC-laden 12-year bond in February, it didn't offer investors a choice: anybody wanting new Mexican debt couldn't buy a bond without CACs instead. So there's no way of knowing for sure whether or not Mexico paid a premium for including CACs.

If there is one thing that emerging-market investors hate as much as SDRM, it is exit consents.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev wants Kazakhstan to become a regional capital markets hub for central Asia. But as Guy Norton reports from Almaty, attracting sufficient investor demand will not necessarily be easy.

With falling GDP per capita and minuscule foreign direct investment, things could be going better in Uzbekistan. One positive development, though, is the corporate bond market.

Things are so tough in investment banking that major institutions are prepared to let award-winning credit analysts decamp to the buy side. Among them are some high-fliers in Euromoney's latest annual credit research poll. Kathryn Tully reports.

Russia’s largest and smallest companies are vastly outstripping in growth the relics of the Soviet system that languish in the middle but employ most of the working population.

The hope is that the EBRD’s annual meeting in Tashkent in May will give a much-needed lift to Uzbekistan’s ailing economy. But relations with multilaterals have never been worse, and the country’s human rights record raises questions about why the meeting is taking place there at all.

Hrvoje Radovanic, assistant finance minister and head of funding for the Republic of Croatia, talks to Guy Norton about the country’s borrowing plans for this year and discusses the key drivers behind the strong performance of Croatian debt in recent years.

The danger of accounting irregularities creeping up on them is the one gripe that pretty well all credit analysts have about their jobs at the moment. Post Enron, the idea of unwittingly recommending a company that turns out to have cooked its books is enough to bring on a cold sweat. "How do you predict problems such as Ahold's as an analyst? I think it's a ferociously difficult job," says Catherine Gronquist, director of international credit research at Morgan Stanley. "These demands on them have tested all credit analysts on the buy side and the sell side to practically their breaking point in some cases." This nightmare came true once again when multinational retail group Ahold admitted accounting irregularities. Standard&Poor's immediately downgraded Ahold's bonds to junk and they traded as low as 70 straight away. At press time, there was speculation that the bonds might fall even further to trade as distressed credits.

Hungarian privatization has helped place the economy among the best emerging-market performers of the 1990s. However, questions about the transparency of deals reappeared this year.

After leaving Deutsche Bank, Simon Adamson, previously co-head of European credit research at the bank, joined the London office of independent fixed-income research firm CreditSights on April 1. The New York-based company has more than doubled in size to boast a research team of 17 senior analysts since it was founded in November 2000 by Glenn Reynolds, former head of global corporate bond research at Deutsche Bank. Although CreditSights has a couple of independent competitors in the US, it is the first independent to set up in Europe. Adamson joins Anja King and Nesche Yazgan who started at CreditSights last November, to make a three-strong London team which is becoming something of an enclave of former Deutsche bankers. King was co-head of European high-grade credit research along with Adamson and Yazgan covered investment-grade automotives and transportation and telecoms equipment. Of the 17 senior analysts at CreditSights before Adamson's arrival, eight joined from Deutsche.

CEO, Coller Capital

President, Bank of America, Asia

French bank Société Générale needs to take over a rival - or be taken over - if it is to fulfil its promise in the nascent pan-European market. Crucially, it also needs to overhaul and redirect its investment banking business.