"I was talking to a Merrill Lynch banker the other day who said he wanted his firm to be like Goldman Sachs. I replied: ‘But you’re not.’ It’s like saying you want to be cool when you’re not"

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.

Watch out Standard Chartered: a potential competitor might have been born. London-based investment bank Medicap, 100% owned by BMCE, a Moroccan bank, launched in November, and intends to focus on one of Standard Chartered’s specialities: Africa.

Global problems require global answers.

The sinking dollar – not ­the sub-prime fallout – is the big hurdle for India’s most buoyant sectors.

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.

Issuers opt for convertibles and opportunistic deals.

Vietnam is in a hurry. Rapid economic growth, recent accession to the World Trade Organization and a new seat on the UN Security Council are all encouraging a flood of foreign investment into the country. Yet the politicians remain wary of opening up the market to too much international integration too quickly. Julian Marshall reports from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

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.

The monolines should survive this crisis, but only because the prospect of them being downgraded is an outcome too far for the battered credit market.

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.

"If the shoe was on the other foot, if these were sovereign wealth investors in France, Germany, the UK or the US earning fabulous returns, reducing national deficits, funding social security costs and investing into the rest of the world, would they think it was an issue? I suspect not"

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

Those looking to harm Ms Whitney may want to think twice.

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.

Many investors had been positioning themselves for an inevitable downturn in the leveraged finance market long before this summer’s dislocation. But, ironically, the underwriting abuses of the past few years mean that they could still face a long wait before any meaningful opportunities arise. Louise Bowman reports.

Africa’s banking and capital markets are showing encouraging signs of maturity.

The Future Fund, created last year to cover long-term pension liabilities for the Australian federal public sector, is very much in its infancy but is finally managing money.

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.

In a world of increasingly powerful and mistrusted sovereign wealth funds, Temasek, the investment arm of the Singapore state, stands apart in terms of governance, openness and performance, claims Simon Israel, its executive director. Chris Wright reports.

Infrastructure investment is not without risk. Even the US has found this; the collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis in August led to the realization that much of the country’s ageing infrastructure needs refurbishment. But flows of new money bring their own problems. Investment skills and experience remain the pre-eminent qualities required to succeed.

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.

800,000,000,000 the total dollar value of ECM issuance so far this year. The figure, a record, was achieved on the back of 5,350 transactions. Global convertibles issuance so far this year at $159.6 billion has already exceed 2006’s convertibles total, and global IPO and follow-on volumes are not far off from reaching the total of all ECM issuance in 2006.

Standard & Poor’s finally lowered its long-term corporate credit rating on airports operator BAA to sub-investment grade on November 21. The move comes a full eight months after the agency’s own declared deadline for downgrading the credit. S&P finally acted because of BBA’s "protracted refinancing", the details of which were revealed in Euromoney’s April issue.

The closing months of 2007 are proving to be full of intrigue for watchers of the Japanese banking industry, with the year’s two biggest M&A deals experiencing setbacks while smaller banks look to forge new alliances.

The Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES), is fishing for extra funds after recalculating its plans and projecting that it will lend as much as 15% more than expected for the 2008-11 period, as it seeks to step up its investments in infrastructure. BNDES president Luciano Coutinho has been talking about growth of 10% in lending for infrastructure projects, focused on energy, communications, railways, ports, and water and sanitation. The bank has already announced that it needs an extra R$25 billion ($14 billion) for next year, prompting speculation about how the money will be found.

With the dollar in seeming free fall, the Gulf Cooperation Council is set to discuss the wisdom of keeping its member states’ currencies pegged to the ailing currency.

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.

Spotted in India: Goldman Sachs’s chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, enjoying the festivities at a party in New Delhi hosted by Azim Premji, the silver-haired chief of one of the subcontinent’s biggest IT firms, Wipro.