Despite remaining a largely centrally planned economy, Belarus has not been immune to the fallout from the global credit crunch and the associated macroeconomic slowdown. At the beginning of the year the country was forced to devalue the Belarussian rouble by 20% to BR2,650 to the dollar and raise its key refinancing rate to 14% from 12%.

With US president Barack Obama taking power last month, there were hopes that US-Venezuela relations would improve. Obama initially announced plans to talk to president Hugo Chávez but has since been reported as saying that Chávez exports terrorism, supports the Farc insurgents in Colombia and has obstructed progress in Latin America. "There is still time" for Obama to correct his views, Chávez says. He adds: "No one can say that I threw the first stone at Obama. He threw it at me." He concludes that Obama has the "same stench" as his predecessor, George W Bush.

"I’ve no interest in Davos. I don’t know how they keep the snow from melting with all the hot air. What has Davos ever achieved except perpetuating the belief among participants that they are so very special?"

The UK Debt Management Office is canvassing market opinion on the merits of conducting gilt sales via supplementary measures such as mini-tenders, syndication and even direct placement of gilts with end investors. The size of the UK Treasury’s borrowing requirement led the DMO to consult its Gilt Edged Market Makers in a process that ended on January 28. The DMO is seeking to raise the supply of long-dated and index-linked gilts, in particular. In light of the high financing requirement of £143 billion ($194 billion), £147 billion and £135 billion for the next three years from 2009/10, the government’s medium-term strategy is to skew issuance to long-dated maturities. This strategy seeks to take advantage of strong actuarially driven demand at the long end from pension and insurance funds. The last UK syndicated gilt issuance took place in September 2005 when the DMO sold a £1.25 billion 50-year linker. That was a response to the poor auction outcome of a conventional 50-year gilt in May of that year. The results of the consultation will be announced at the time of the UK budget in March.

Do end investors, be they feeder funds or funds of hedge funds, or indeed any party offering advice on investing in hedge funds, properly understand the strategies being run? The Madoff case has thrown light on the fact that even the simplest of strategies are clearly not understood by end investors.

It is not all bad news at Royal Bank of Scotland. At least its Saudi franchise is improving, which might ultimately fetch the troubled UK bank a higher price if it decides to sell the stake it inherited from ABN Amro.

“It’s the right time to go for me. I was going to go a year ago. It’s been 25 years and I’m 50 years old. Time for new blood to fight the new fight!” says Paul Hearn on announcing his retirement from BNP Paribas in January.

Latin American sovereigns are on track to meet their 2009 financing needs after an impressive start to the year, according to senior debt bankers. Barclays Capital reckons that 34% of this year’s estimated total of $19 billion of emerging market sovereign issuance has already been successfully placed despite fears that the US and Europe would crowd them out. Latin American corporates, in contrast, are facing more difficult and expensive financing.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is continuing its efforts to put an end to some of the sharper practices that have plagued the country’s retail foreign exchange market. On January 15, the regulator announced it had charged James Ossie of Atlanta, Georgia, and his company, CRE Capital Corporation (CRE) of Alpharetta, Georgia, with operating a Ponzi scheme. The CFTC claims that the scam sucked in more than 100 apparent clients and involved about $25 million. Neither Ossie nor CRE had ever been registered with the CFTC.

Old-style capitalism is in disrepute. Fans of Islamic finance say it is a model whose ethics give it more sustainability. But optimists will be disappointed to see how far it is part of the global bust. Dominic O’Neill reports.

Last month in this space Euromoney predicted the rise of a breed of analysts somewhat clumsily dubbed ‘below eight-percenters’, that is analysts forecasting GDP growth rates for China in 2009 below the 8% threshold that was the consensus towards the end of last year and was the government target. So it has come to pass, and sooner than expected: a note published on January 5 by Jun Ma, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, predicts GDP growth for China to decline to 7% in 2009 and 6.6% in 2010. The team at RBS were gloomier still just over two weeks later, forecasting 6% for 2009. Will the first ‘below five-percenters’ please make themselves known?

The most canny issuers in 2008 were those that realized it was important to get on and raise capital even if the price was not great. Waiting for the market to improve was and remains a potentially fatal strategy. Alex Chambers reports.

A looming recession threatens a shake-up of the country’s staid industries. A boldly led Japan Inc would help the global economy. But such leadership has been promised before and never delivered. Lawrence White reports.

The Euromoney Japanese Digest has published a list of deals of the year. The full list of winners is:

In January the Asian debt market reopened with more than $30 billion of bonds sold, breaking a record that has stood for 10 years. The region’s syndicate bankers are confident that more could be on the way as governments look to fund stimulus packages and the region’s top banks seek to raise fresh capital to shore up their balance sheets.

Three key questions arise from the recent sale of stakes in Chinese banks by their global counterparts, two of them widely asked, one not. Observers are wondering what the impact will be on global banks’ relations with China, and what will happen when the lock-ups on foreign bank stakes in ICBC expire in April. Rather fewer are asking if, irrespective of the global lenders’ capital positions, this is anyway a good time to be bailing out of Chinese banks.

As the terrible fourth-quarter results were unveiled, Bank of America started briefing against John Thain, Merrill Lynch’s chief executive. This is always a high-risk press strategy. A public relations specialist comments: "Washing dirty laundry in public is dangerous. Now even grannies in Topeka, Kansas, know that Bank of America is in chaos."

Bank of America/Merrill Lynch tops DCM bookrunner tables.