What does it take to be a pioneer in Corporate Social Responsibility?

Credit card ABS has so far escaped contamination by sub-prime. Some might worry that volumes are up, but key metrics are strong. If this market does well, it could be a template for others. Alex Chambers reports.

Bank of New York Mellon is to acquire Brazilian asset management company ARX Capital Management. ARX has $2.6 billion in Brazilian multi-strategy, long/short and long-only investment strategies. Morgan Stanley has added to its growing slate of hedge fund investments, and has bought a minority stake in Traxis Partners, a hedge fund founded by former employee Barton Biggs. And RAB Capital has bought a 20% stake in Tokyo-headquartered hedge fund firm Prestige Asset Management. Last month it acquired Hong Kong-based hedge fund Pi Investment Management.

The Spanish savings bank sector’s days of annual loan growth of more than 20% are over as construction wobbles and cédulas are tarnished by the international credit crunch. Cajas need to re-examine their funding strategies and business plans, writes Peter Koh.

Rumours are rife that quant funds stumbled again in November. If they are to thrive in the future, they need to learn from these mistakes.

Plus Markets, a London exchange group, has launched a new trading platform and expanded the list of stocks it trades. The new system, provided by OMX, will offer cheap quote-driven trading in 7,500 securities including the stocks of all the companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, 70 AIM-listed companies and several of the most liquid continental stocks. This is in addition to the more than 200 stocks listed on Plus itself. The move has come as a surprise to some market observers, who thought that Plus’s ambitions were confined to small-cap and micro-cap stocks and who believed that Plus was positioning itself as an alternative to AIM.

Asset-backed securities not troubled by US sub-prime problems.

Argentina’s capital markets could be about to take off, as more than 20 companies line up to list on the Buenos Aires stock exchange.

The success of Trade Ideas, a platform developed by a consortium of investment banks for distributing trading ideas to their clients, shows that trading ideas are becoming an increasingly important element of the brokerage service that buy-side clients are willing to pay for.

While India and China look the best long-term bets, short-term gains could be easier to find elsewhere in the region.

Rob Walker has become head of Africa debt capital markets at Standard Bank, South Africa’s biggest banking group. Head of DCM Africa is a newly created position, reflecting the bank’s decision to centralize its Africa DCM coverage in London. "The region deserves a focused approach," says Florian von Hartig, managing director and global DCM head at Standard Bank. Rob Walker moved to London from Gaborone, Botswana, where he led the DCM efforts of Stanbic, as Standard Bank’s branch network in Africa excluding South Africa is known. Also joining Standard Bank’s new London-based Africa DCM team are Gaelle Biteghe, previously a relationship manager at Citi’s corporate and investment banking arm, and Kojo Amoo-Gottfried, an analyst previously at RBS.

Goldman Sachs has appointed Beatrice Sánchez as regional manager for its private wealth management business in Latin America. She will join the US bank next spring from HSBC Private Bank. Sánchez will be based in Miami.

Two of Kazakhstan’s leading companies are poised to fully test investor sentiment towards the central Asian state in the coming weeks, with big transactions in the debt and equity markets.

US buyout firm Carlyle Group has expanded its Warsaw-based central and eastern European team with the appointment of three professionals. Janusz Guy has been named a managing director, and Aleksander Kacprzyk and Piotr Nocen come in as directors. They join the team established and led by managing director Ryszard Wojtkowski.

Alfa Bank has become the first privately owned Russian bank to raise overseas funding in the post-credit crunch era.

Pakistan has become a country that generates two types of stories: one positively glowing, extolling the recently healthy financial markets and rising foreign direct investment; one wholly negative, after the country’s latest skirmish with one or more of rising militancy, dictatorship, government strife or old-fashioned bankruptcy.

Next year a handful of top international banks might expand operations into Guatemala, according to analysts and bankers.

The sub-prime mortgage market crisis in the US and the associated credit crunch has grabbed most of the headlines in the financial press in recent weeks but Investec Asset Management believes that the much less widely followed economic upturn in Africa merits greater attention in the light of recent global market volatility. Chris Derksen and Roelof Horne, managers of the Africa Funds at IAM and co-authors of a recent report – Why invest in Africa? – highlight the fact that Africa, far from being the investment basket case it was in the 1980s and 1990s, has experienced strong positive trends this decade, with GDP rising faster than the global average and growing free-market economic success.

The once-unthinkable news that super-senior CDO risk could be vulnerable to downgrade has been very bad news for the monoline guarantors as well as the banks. Most vulnerable to write-downs as a result of wrapping these tranches is Ambac, with $29.2 billion exposure to US ABS CDOs. MBIA has $19.3 billion and XLCA $16.1 billion. However, Moody’s reckons that the likelihood of any of these firms facing a capital shortfall is unlikely (MBIA) or moderate (Ambac and XLCA). The rating agencies deem Natixis-owned CIFG to be at the greatest risk of facing a capital shortfall. The firm has a $4 billion exposure to the CDO market. Of the big four firms, FSA is the most comfortably positioned, with a mere $364 million exposure to US ABS CDOs.

Benjamin Jacquard has been appointed global head of structured credit markets at Calyon, replacing Loïc Fery, formerly head of credit markets, who left the bank in September. Fery was forced out, along with several other senior officials in Calyon’s credit markets business, after a $250 million loss in credit indices trading. With a new leader, the French bank will hope that its newly named structured credit markets business will fare better. Jacquard ran the correlation book and was head of credit structuring at Bank of America before joining Calyon as global head of credit market trading six months ago.

Markit purchase of IIC could herald creation of a global credit derivatives index.

Market remains open but substantial new-issue premiums return.

Despite all the jawboning over the past few years about succession planning, banks seem woefully unprepared if they are forced to jettison a flailing chief executive because of cauldron-like shareholder pressure.

A study by Ibbotson Associates of the performance of more than 4,000 funds of hedge funds reveals that the smallest 25% under perform the other 75% of funds by more than two percentage points annually because they deliver lower alpha. However, the very largest 5% of funds of hedge funds also slightly under perform other large funds because of capacity constraints.

The rapid uptake of exchange-traded structured notes in the US has got the country’s mutual fund industry on the offensive. Its trade association is lobbying Congress to change the tax laws to make the notes less attractive. But the structured products industry is fighting back. John Ferry reports.

Hong Kong investors have become happily addicted to China’s flip-flop attitude to the so-called "through train" programme, under which mainland investors will in theory be allowed to buy stocks listed in the former UK colony.

Concern is growing in Israel over the US MBS portfolio of what until recently was the country’s biggest bank by market capitalization, Hapoalim.

Japan’s Nomura booked a ¥73 billion ($621 million) loss from its residential mortgage-backed securities unit as the company announced its exit from the US RMBS market. The bank described the move as part of a general reduction in its US activities that will cut the number of employees by 400 to 900. Although the loss is small in comparison with the billion-dollar losses at some American banks, it is the largest yet reported by a major Japanese institution as a result of the sub-prime problem. In a statement, Nomura president and CEO Nobuyuki Koga acknowledged "disappointing results" in the US RMBS market but said that the bank had "moved decisively to deal with the issue and had avoided further and protracted losses by taking firm and immediate action".

The big banks’ Mlec fund might well unblock the present credit log jam. But there’s no escaping the fact that global liquidity has contracted and capital is being repriced upwards.