The $700 billion trade-finance market is one of the few large pools of tradeable fixed-income assets that has not yet attracted the attention of institutional fixed-income investors. Changing that, and propelling the fragmented and illiquid trade-finance market through the same developments that transformed the emerging-market debt market in the 1980s is the ambition of a group of bankers and traders who last month launched Internet Trade Finance Exchange (ITF).

Issuer: British TelecommunicationsAmount: $10 billionType of issue: global bondDate of issue: December 5, 2000Bookrunners: Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Schroder SSB

Mexico ended 2000 on a high note. It was not only the fastest-growing economy in Latin America but posted its best economic performance in 20 years. Now, as it moves into 2001, analysts are divided on how it will fare. What is clear, however, is that regardless of the outcome, something must be done to improve the stock market's lacklustre showing.

Following the turbulence of 2000 in financial markets - with the euro in free fall, volatility in tech stocks, a climbing oil price and continuing problems in Japan - economists are divided into two camps over the outlook for 2001: the cautious and the downright worried.

Is news and trading organization chief Mike Bloomberg set to run for mayor of New York? That's certainly the impression several of his senior staff have given, and Bloomberg himself has made no denial.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the stock markets, the biggest bear on the block is back.

The Financial Services Authority will set up a new market abuse regime next year, but withthe proposals on the table, City lawyers doubt that it will make their lives, and those of their clients, any easier.

CSFB is also the chief suspect in a probe into IPO allocation processes by the Securities and Exchange Commission, one which could shake up the entire industry.

Austria's banks may have had regional expansion thrust upon them, but they have achieved much over the past decade in broadening their franchise, developing retail banking in central and eastern Europe and acting as a bridgehead between transitional economies and the western capital base. Austrian banks reacted very quickly to the opportunities that were opened up in the region as a result of political reform.

Each month since last August, Vladimir Putin’s government has attempted to put in place a new aspect of economic reform. But some problems, notably the banking sector and the entrenched Soviet-style bureaucracy, are particularly intractable.

Emerging market governments were forced to bail out collapsing banking systems at huge public cost following the economic and financial crises of the 1990s and 1980s. Many are now considering setting up deposit insurance systems to bring more transparency and stability to implicit sovereign guarantees for banks. Oddly, in the US, where deposit insurance was first established and whose model emerging markets are often encouraged to follow, deposit insurance is being reconsidered. On its own, it’s no safeguard against banking crises.

Russia’s post-Soviet oil industry was restructured by robber barons who showed a scant regard for minority shareholders and ran their businesses on a shoestring, salting away funds abroad. Now, though, a harder government line and, above all, high oil prices, have encouraged modernization and a desire to please foreign investors

Turning money and small-value payments into digital form doesn’t interest the banks – it’s against their interests and too expensive. Into the vacuum have stepped hundreds of payment schemes, many of them claiming they have found the Holy Grail. These boasts are premature. Some ideas are elegant but don’t have critical mass. Worse still, they rely on those indifferent beasts, the banks. Find your way through the Darwinian jungle with the help of David Shirreff

This one's a tough one.

A wakeup call is hardly ever welcome. Core shareholders of Indian companies are being jolted awake by a hostile predator, a rare event in corporate India. In October, Renaissance Estates, a Delhi-based company owned by Abhishek Dalmia, made an open offer to buy Gesco, a property company owned by the Sheths, a prominent industrialist family with interests in the shipping business. Dalmia had bought up just over 10% of Gesco's shares in the market, and bid for another 45% to gain control from the Sheths who own around 13%.

State-owned Sberbank, the former People’s Savings Bank, accounts for a quarter of Russia’s bank assets and half of deposits. Along with other banks in which the state has a stake, it is beginning to dominate the sector. Ben Aris spoke to Andrei Kazmin, the chairman of Sberbank’s board, who claims that the state connection does not give his bank an unfair advantage

At the end of last year, a new stock exchange was unveiled in Vienna – the New Europe Exchange. It typifies the Austrian financial markets: it’s a joint venture with a German partner aimed at trading equities of central and eastern European companies. Austrian banks have long known they cannot survive on the meagre profits at home. Increasingly their search for new business will lead them beyond even near neighbours.

Corporate governance is back on the agenda in Russia. Along with squashing the oligarchs and bashing the regional governors, as part of Putin's "law and order" drive, the president also wants to bring Russia's companies to heel.

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic offer three different puzzles for western European banks. While the fall of the iron curtain presented new opportunities in new markets, the transition from communist regimes to free market economies is still proving a painful struggle.

Stephen Jennnings, CEO at Renaissance Capital, looks at consolidation in Russian industry.

"If Austria's capital market can be proud of one thing above all else," says a foreign banker in Vienna, "it is the performance of the Federal Financing Agency. I would say that in sophistication and risk management Helmut Eder and his team are one of the top five borrowers in Europe."

Although the internet is not tearing up the rule-book in cash management, it is subtly altering the banks’ business models, both changing the way banks provide these services and creating a new class of customers. By Chris Cockerill.

Jim Toffey takes a seat in the conference room of his 51st floor offices in the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. His composed manner is the result of increasingly broad recognition that he has helped build what is thus far the only successful multi-bank broker-to-client trading consortium. Back in the mid-1990s he and Lee Olesky, now Europe CEO of Brokertec, persuaded their employer, Credit Suisse First Boston, to allow them to set up an electronic platform to trade US government bonds.

Nasdaq is still collapsing and there are worries that the US economy could be recession bound as the tech investment boom ends. But I remain optimistic. I reckon the global economy is in for a super-soft landing to sub-3% growth in 2001. Oil prices will stay around $25 a barrel and global inflation will fall, boosting real incomes. Risk appetite will recover. The mini-bear market is almost over.

When the first generation of online firms appeared in the US equity market, they loudly broadcast their ambitions to take on the established players in distribution and new issues. Some made a brief impression, a few managed to get themselves acquired by their larger rivals, many failed. The big firms rolled on. The latest group of internet start-ups have learned a lesson: don’t compete directly with the big equity firms, do something they don’t do.

Vladimir Putin has quickly crushed Russia's infamous oligarchs who once thrived under Boris Yeltsin, though the Family still holds some influence in Moscow. Alongside it, two new factions now share the ascendancy in the Kremlin. Sergei Ivanov leads the hardliners that Putin is using to tighten his grip on political power. German Gref leads the liberal economists charting Russia's economic reform. A clash between them may be coming.

If ever a merger story encapsulated the spirit of a time, French internet service provider Wanadoo's takeover of the UK's Freeserve has to be it. Freeserve, launched in the UK as an ISP in 1998 by the Dixons electrical retail chain, and floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1999, has seen its value collapse in 2000 as the boom in internet stocks turned to bust. But unlike notorious cases such as clothing retailer boo.com, Freeserve has managed to survive the turmoil and looks to have found the ideal parent to take the brand forward.

Listening to Grigory Marchenko talk you could be forgiven for thinking he was central bank governor of a booming first world economy. The budget is balanced - in fact there is a surplus; financial infrastructure is robust and the banking system in good shape. Marchenko himself is urbane, highly qualified and very persuasive. He is however the chairman of the Kazakhstan National Bank and the country he describes is not one its inhabitants are entirely familiar with.

The most dynamic of Russia’s companies are relatively small compared with the energy and utility behemoths. Typically manufacturing consumer goods with a rapid payback from investment, they have been able, so far, to grow using their own resources.

Glenn Grossman doesn't have a lot of good words for banking consolidation. "Each year the party gets better and attendance improves, and each year we raise less money," he says.