Private equity firm the Carlyle Group has announced plans to cut 10% of its staff, some 100 employees. It will be the first firm-wide lay-off in the group’s 20-year history.

The Latin American hedge fund index compiled by HFR was down 25.41% at end of November as the Brazilian real was hit, but compared with Russia/eastern Europe and Asia ex-Japan, which were down 53.95% and 35.61%, respectively, the region is the safer of the emerging markets.

Levels quoted make no market sense whatsoever.

When it comes to retaining clients, hedge funds can’t win at the moment.

The president of the European Central Bank is at the centre of the global financial storm. He knows his actions are crucial to the survival of the entire global financial system. He gives his most in-depth interview since the collapse of Lehman Brothers to Clive Horwood and Mark Johnson.

The European Commission has launched a public consultation into the adequacy and supervision and regulation of hedge funds and private equity funds. For private equity, the focus will be on corporate governance, transparency and reporting. Issues of transparency, oversight, risk management, capital and short-selling are to be looked at as far as hedge funds are concerned.

European institutional investors and banks were increasing their use of equity derivatives in the months leading up to the events of September and October 2008 but it remains unclear how much of this business will ultimately be affected by the financial crisis that has also hit structured products and equity derivative investors and traders hard.

Japan’s megabanks embarked on a year-end fundraising spree that will spill over into 2009, despite spending much of 2008 seeming to enjoy excess capital reserves as they invested billions of dollars in foreign financial institutions. Deteriorating conditions in domestic stock markets, to which Japan’s top banks are heavily exposed, and the poor banking environment in general, mean that they are seeking to shore up their capital positions. The optimistic outlook is that the banks are raising funds in anticipation of high demand for loans in the new year. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group’s $5.8 billion preferred share issuance priced on December 11 was the largest deal of that kind from Japan ever, with the firm aiming to raise further funds in January. Three days earlier, on December 8, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the country’s largest banking group by assets, priced a ¥417 billion ($4.5 billion) common equity offering at a 3% discount to the share price. The group’s share price was the worst performing among Japan’s top three banks during the run-up to the deal’s pricing but the stock has since recovered.

Having negotiated away their covenant protection in the boom years, lenders find themselves in a weak negotiating position in the bust.

At the start of 2008, Paul Day, deputy head of research at MIG Investments, predicted that sterling would be the dog of the FX market in 2008. He reckoned that it would plunge to parity against the euro – a prediction that many thought singled him out as being barking mad.

The Venezuelan parliament has begun a process that could allow president Hugo Chávez unlimited re-election and back his bid to rule until 2021. The proposed constitutional amendment must now be read twice in parliament before it can be brought to referendum. Chávez, who came to power in 1999, was re-elected president of Venezuela in December 2006, for a term expiring in 2013. Two debates are also necessary, one took place on December 18, and the second is expected in mid-January. The National Electoral Council will then convene a referendum within 30 days.

Kazakhstan’s bankers are taking a defiant stance towards the financial crisis. Despite the fact that important sectors of the economy such as banking and construction have been hit hard by the global credit crisis, which has cut off the supply of cheap foreign funding that backed their rapid expansion, investment bankers believe there is still plenty of potential business to be fought over.

Madoff should mark the end of feeder funds.

India’s largest corporates, desperate to shore up working capital or pay the interest on overpriced flagship acquisitions, are trying every trick in the book to raise cash from investors, banks and non-bank financial institutions.

A fuller understanding of true trading costs should help decisions about post-trade functions.

TraderTools has unveiled a compact keyboard, the AI-1, which it says will simplify the trading process. It comes with extra-large, colour-coded keys that should prove extremely useful for those old spot dealers who have delayed their retirement because of the lack of a bonus in 2008. The keyboard can be connected to a wide range of trading platforms. I did suggest to TraderTools that it should launch a version with a ‘mom tick’ button for all the snipers that still exist in the market, but apparently there’s not that great a demand for it any more in spot. In options, though, it’s a different matter.

Hedge funds were ill-prepared for a downturn. Survivors of the shake-out will need to develop their business management skills to cope, says Nick Evans, editor of EuroHedge.

Markets are positioned for something akin to the Great Depression. With so much doom and gloom in the air, now is the right time to buy equities.

Few would have predicted such a result given the underlying doom and gloom in the financial markets, but Icap’s 16th annual charity day, held on December 10, proved another outstanding success. The company donates all of its brokerage earned during the day to various charities. Last year, it raised a record £9.2 million ($14 million) and few realistically expected that figure to be surpassed. However, despite the sombre mood nearly everywhere else, the atmosphere at Icap was buoyant. As has become the custom, the company’s offices around the world were visited by a string of celebrities throughout the day.

The use of technology to create a virtual single-trading environment is well understood. But while attention has tended to focus on the front end, it is just as important to get all the links in place in the post-trade area as well.

What does the future hold for Mexico’s Banamex, which Citi owns? Although the US bank claims that Banamex is important to its recovery, after its sub-prime losses, many bankers and analysts in Mexico are sceptical. Speculation is rife about the future of the bank.

The endless series of new index lows has repeatedly confounded investors who see equities as having become cheap again. The rally at the end of last year has raised hopes once more that valuations might have found a bottom. However, for some leading strategists, what looks like cheap today may not be cheap enough.

The European secondary loan market was bracing itself for a painful year-end in December as balance-sheet-driven forced selling started to bite.

The CME has hired Mark Thompson as a director. His main task will be to look after the exchange’s hedge fund clients on the US’s eastern seaboard. Thompson, who joins the exchange from UBS, will be based in New York and report to Tina Lemieux, the exchange’s managing director, hedge funds and broker services.

Otherwise the country faces a crisis akin to 1998.

Five years ago, Euromoney was catching up over lunch with a senior figure at a large European bank. Something was troubling him. His private bankers were reporting that emissaries from a large US-based hedge fund had been approaching wealthy European clients telling them that they had unearthed a secret formula to extract regular, risk-free returns from the stock markets.

Saxo Bank has had a mixed press this year, which is perhaps testament to the fact that it can no longer be considered to be a junior upstart in foreign exchange.

According to a statement released after the Latin American Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (Claaf) meeting in December, Latin American governments could have very limited access to credit in 2009. The committee, which includes former finance ministers and central bank governors in the region, fear that Latin American borrowers could get crowded out of the credit markets as the US attempts to fund its fiscal deficit of more than $1 trillion. As large volumes of US treasury bonds are issued so the Latin governments, which face financing needs in excess of $250 billion next year, will have to develop "powerful and innovative" new mechanisms to direct money back to the region, warned the Claaf committee.

Data released by Icap, CME and CLS all provide support for what market participants have been saying for the past few weeks – liquidity is drying up. Daily turnover on Icap’s EBS platform averaged $167 billion, a fall of around 32% from November 2007 and from October 2008. Similarly, the CME saw turnover in its futures and options average 471,000 contracts a day, down 26% on November 2007. Elsewhere, CLS says it settled a daily average of 588,416 instructions with a value of $3.25 trillion. In comparison, it settled 727,934 instructions in October and 488,000 deals in November 2007. Of course, November 2007 was an exceptionally busy month, which has probably exaggerated the severity of the annualized decline.