Investment into UK mortgage bank Bradford & Bingley by private equity firm TPG has been scrapped following a downgrade of the firm. TPG was due to invest about $350 million in B&B but had protected its agreement by including an escape clause that allowed it to withdraw if Moody’s downgraded B&B twice prior to investment. Moody’s downgraded B&B from A3 to Baa1 last month.

Regulators have put huge pressure on the CDS market to address counterparty risk. And the collapse of Lehman Brothers shows why. But in doing so they might be creating a bandwagon that exacerbates rather than solves the problem. Louise Bowman reports.

There will be more rallies but the equity market trend is downward, and there’s a worrying backdrop of rising inflation mixed with declining growth.

Investors worry that proposed regulation will punish the European market for weaknesses in US sub-prime origination.

Governments should give investors what they need and issue inflation-linked bonds.

Mark Hillery has apparently left hedge fund Tudor. There is no indication whether his departure is permanent or a sabbatical. Meanwhile, the firm has hired Andrew Bound from Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Bound left GSAM in May and is believed to be starting at the fund in August.

The last of the traditional monoline insurance companies to maintain their triple-A rating are facing a downgrade.

Promising "a new exchange for the new economic world order", the Singapore Mercantile Exchange (SMX) aims to be the Asian hub of commodities derivatives trading. The exchange, announced on July 9, will offer futures and options trading in precious metals, base metals, energy, agricultural commodities, currency pairs, carbon credits and commodity indices.

Euromoney’s annual structured credit poll reveals that JPMorgan is leading a much reduced pack.

In-house hedge funds look to have been a costly mistake for investment banks. Far better, it seems, is to take stakes in independent ones.

The market, it is said, is always right, but the performance of Icap’s share price is seemingly at odds with the company’s financial growth. Of course, Icap’s shares have been caught up with the general malaise affecting global equity valuations in general and financial stocks in particular but as the company pointed out in an interim management statement issued in mid-July, it has continued to benefit as a result of the continuing volatility in financial markets.

The annual Daiwa SMBC debt syndicate summer press party will stay in the memory of all who attended. But not just because of the fine wine, company and fare on offer at Sweetings, a City of London culinary institution. An unintended level of prescience led European head of fixed income at the Japanese brokerage Andrew Asbury to decide that the theme for the party would be based on reality TV programme The Apprentice. Asbury, affectionately known as Asbo in the industry, had partygoers vote for their favourite members of the Daiwa syndicate team. In keeping with the Apprentice theme, Asbo took up the role of Sir Alan Sugar/Donald Trump.

Nasir Afaf has joined Calyon as its global head of FX trading. Sources say he is replacing Steve Nutland; Nutland moved at the end of June from London to run Calyon’s FX operations in Asia.

Markets have changed and so will the terms for Mexico’s next round of toll road financing.

New heads of fixed income, loans and equity appointed in Europe – Berman takes banking role.

It seems astonishing that misuse of models still takes place in the foreign exchange market. But there is no doubt it does, although the industry’s self-imposed code of Omertà means that even those cases that seemingly everyone knows about rarely get exposed.

MTF (that’s multilateral trading facilities to you and me) is about to become the acronym of the autumn, with umpteen new systems launching in Europe. It might be bad news for the incumbent exchanges; is it good news for anyone?

Car manufacturers and their captive finance units might think themselves removed from much of the world’s financial turmoil. But are rapidly expanding emerging markets enough to keep the gloom at bay? Jethro Wookey reports.

The role of the European Central Bank as the saviour of the European securitization market over the last year is not even up for debate.

Family disputes in Asian listed companies have an unfortunate propensity to boil over unresolved into the public arena, raising important corporate governance issues.

Despite the far superior performance of CLOs to that of ABS CDOs, CLO managers on both sides of the Atlantic face a battle to survive in present and future market conditions.

China’s National Development and Reform Commission announced on July 22 that it would strengthen approval requirements for foreign capital inflow in an effort to control more speculative investments. In a note analysing the potential impact of the changes, Qu Hongbin and Ma Xiaoping, economists at HSBC, say that the major changes include requirements for all foreign investments to seek NDRC approval, stricter reviews of the credibility of foreign investment projects and "the prevention of capital inflows that are not based on real investments."

As the woes in western banking continue, Euromoney thought it would offer its readers something to salve their wounds as they deal with the underperformance of their financial stocks.

In the new world of covered bonds, it really does matter where you come from.

In India it’s simply called The Feud and, on July 18, after years of simmering, it finally boiled over. That day, Mumbai-based industrialist Anil Ambani was finally, unwillingly, forced to pull the plug on a planned telecommunications mega-merger between his flagship corporation Reliance Communications (RelCom) and MTN Group of South Africa.

Panic over the state of Fannie and Freddie may have been overplayed, but more transparency over their role in US housing should be welcomed.

Standard Chartered Bank has relaunched the Shariah-compliant version of its online treasury FX trading and hedging platform under its global brand for Islamic products, Standard Chartered Saadiq. The bank says it is the first to launch online services in Islamic FX utilizing the wa’ad structure, which enables Islamic companies and institutions to hedge forward FX exposures under a Shariah-compliant structure.

Just weeks after RBS’s shareholders took up 95% of the rights on offer in the UK bank’s £12 billion ($24 billion) rights issue, the largest ever, investors shunned similar cash calls from UK banks HBOS and Barclays.

IPO ends long struggle for the gambling tycoon.