$20,500,000,000 The value of equity capital raisings postponed or withdrawn so far in 2008, according to Dealogic. The value of deals pulled is more than 10 times as much as the $1.9 billion over the same period in 2007 and is the highest ever on record.

Are banks biting the hand that feeds them? Perhaps, but what choice do they have?

Deutsche Bank is believed to have suspended two of its Italian FX sales team because of procedural irregularities. Sources say that Riccardo d’Antonio, the bank’s head of Italian FX sales based in London, and his subordinate, Santo Caristo, who was based in Milan, were told of the action in early March. Their suspension is believed to relate to a small loss incurred by one of their clients, which led to an abuse of the bank’s booking procedures. Deutsche and the Financial Services Authority, which held d’Antonio’s registration, decline to comment.

If there’s another Bear Stearns or Northern Rock-style blow-up, will any other bank be willing or able to pick up the pieces?

Despite the volume of high-profile mergers and acquisitions between exchanges, the number of trading venues in the US is an astonishing 55 and rising. According to industry consultant Larry Tabb: "The US financial markets are not just in flux; they are in full-out, no holds-barred, free-for-all radical change." Moreover, it is a trend that he believes is likely to be exported.

"The private equity party is over," says Kevin Dolan, chief executive of $5 billion fund of hedge funds La Fayette Investment Management in London. The credit crunch has made it difficult for private equity firms to take companies private, and that is good news for activist hedge funds, he claims.

Spanish bank BBVA has announced plans to open a new platform in Brazil, following the sale of its 5.01% stake in Banco Bradesco.

Some of Argentina’s biggest companies are raising finance to invest in the booming agriculture sector in Latin America, on the back of steep rises in soft commodity prices.

Citadel Known to be taking full advantage of the carnage in the markets, Citadel is now launching a multi-strategy macro investment business to cash in on arbitrage and trading opportunities. Kaveh Alamouti has been hired from Moore Capital to run the business.

But CDO managers are paying a premium, especially in the US.

One characteristic that both the ABS and leveraged loan markets share – apart from having had a hideous time over the past nine months – is that fledgling indices for both (the ABX and LCDS/LevX respectively) have been subjected to the most testing market conditions in memory very early on in their development.

Highly levered funds are always at the mercy of credit and liquidity suppliers. So be wary of those active in markets where liquidity can rapidly dry up, says Neil Wilson.

Deutsche Bank’s global head of equity and derivatives trading, Noreddine Sebti, is packing his bags and ditching the Big Apple for Hong Kong, in a move that the bank says reflects Deutsche’s increasing focus on the Asia-Pacific region, which it expects to overtake Europe in terms of equity trading this year.

Brian Stevenson is the head of the new global transaction services division at RBS, following its acquisition of ABN Amro’s business. In his first interview since he took the job, he talks to Laurence Neville about separation, integration and what the future holds.

US investment bank Merrill Lynch has created a new infrastructure equities index, giving investors convenient access to the projected infrastructure boom in Russia.

Market participants say that the borrowing binge by Russian banks and corporates in recent years could come back to haunt them, given the much tighter credit market conditions in 2008.

The credit crunch is inevitably limiting banks’ ability to offer supply chain finance services. But demand for these is set to keep growing, so the broader effect might be consolidation of the business into the hands of a few truly global banks. Laurence Neville reports.

Rapid growth can mean rising inflation, as Vietnam is discovering.

"It is very hard to distinguish a catastrophe CDO from any other type of CDO in this market – aren’t all CDOs catastrophes?"

All market participants must still confront the reality of near total market failure across the debt and money markets, an inability to sell even quality assets for cash or to borrow against them and a complete loss of faith between financial institutions. More public money is surely coming, but how can it repair this?

Local-currency debt markets in emerging economies are beginning to suffer from the credit crisis and broader global slowdown.

But lenders will price to encourage trading.

Investors looking for attractive long-term return potential could do worse than look at bank stocks in southeastern Europe. That’s the conclusion of a recent report by Günther Hohberger and Gernot Jarny, banking analysts at Erste Bank in Vienna. Entitled South east European Banks: Boom or bust? the report looked at the banking sectors in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia, and concluded that overall growth rates for banks in the emerging economies of southeastern Europe versus the more developed markets in central Europe will be higher for the next decade at least.

There are signs that Venezuela is moving away from the plummeting dollar for some of its oil contracts. Energy minister Rafael Ramírez said last month that his country would insist on payments in euros on some contracts. Ramírez declined to give further details, although the move is bound to further damage relations with the US government. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has been critical of the Bush administration’s economic policy, blaming it for the dollar’s slump. He wants Opec members to move from pricing oil in dollars to a basket of currencies.

As part of plans to boost Moscow’s position as an international financial centre, the Federal Financial Markets Service has announced plans to exempt investment in securities from taxation. The proposal forms part of a strategy document covering the period to 2012. If approved, the FFMS proposal will come into force in 2009.

The financing of Nigerian energy company Oando’s acquisition of a 49.8% stake in two offshore oil blocks owned by Royal Dutch Shell was due to close at the end of March, according to Wale Tinubu, the company’s group chief executive.

Despite widespread investor puts of pre-crunch extendible notes, the sector is experiencing a relatively good 2008, with investors calling the shots.

Chatting with Ajith Cabraal, the amiable governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, in his lofty eyrie above Colombo, one could be forgiven for thinking that he’s presiding over some approximation of a Switzerland-sur-tropique. Although his Indian Ocean homeland is besieged by a civil war escalated by an ambitious president with an advancing personality cult, "things aren’t nearly as bad as they might appear on CNN," Cabraal says.

Commodity prices continue to break records, defying the spectre of slowing growth in the US and the performance of other asset classes. With some commentators attributing the price rises to the billions being poured in by investors, is it boom or bubble? Peter Koh reports.