Rumours are doing the rounds that an extremely large North American pension fund has taken a big hit in FX.

This year was shaping up to be yet another record-shattering year for Latin American IPOs but a sharp stock market correction in May and June put paid to any such hopes. Many IPOs have been cancelled over the past couple of months, and the few that have come to market have struggled out of the gate.

Are the much-hyped credit derivative product companies now lining up to launch relying on an arbitrage that is dangerously close to disappearing?

Self-made billionaire Mark Cuban, who bought basketball team the Dallas Mavericks with proceeds from the sale of his shared company Broadcast.com to Yahoo!, is launching a website aimed at exposing corporate fraud.

Efforts to launch a CMBS index in Europe have foundered, so the proponents of the product have now decided to abandon the original project and start again.

In the June edition of Euromoney, our story ‘Spac probe hits wall of silence ’ contained a quote wrongly attributed to Floyd Wittlin of Bingham McCutchen. Our apologies to all concerned.

The primary equity market is the latest victim of the sustained falls in stock markets around the world, now into its second month.

Emerging markets have not responded well to the recent wobble of international stock markets. But if IPO activity can be considered as an indicator for economic expectations in a market, investors still have plenty of confidence in wide-ranging growth in Russia.

Bradford & Bingley’s treasurer, Peter Green, and head of capital markets and securitization, Mark Winter, want to regain ownership from investment banks of their institution’s dialogue with investors. They are following a simple strategy of diversifying the investor base. Allied to a remarkable level of transparency during the printing of new issues, this is already reaping its rewards. Alex Chambers reports.

Equity-linked bankers are among the very few people who actually like to watch markets fall. This is because depressed equity prices and elevated volatility help to make convertible bonds a lot more attractive, especially given the rising interest rate environment.

Hot on the heels of its highly successful $11 billion IPO in Hong Kong, mainland Chinese state-owned Bank of China is listing in Shanghai, raising an additional $2.5 billion.

A government committed to reforming Portugal’s public sector has also shown that it cares about capital markets. A recent 30-year bond issue signalled a new focus on developing the yield curve and a new covered bond law promises benefits for both issuers and investors.

The equity market’s violent reaction to seemingly innocuous data has puzzled many commentators. At first bond investors reacted much more calmly to inflation fears but subsequently they seem to have been infected by the equity investors’ pessimism.

“Is that ABN Amro doing badly? I noticed they’re using a minicab firm. It’s always a sign that a bank’s in trouble when they use minicabs rather than licensed cabs”

A sharp sell-off in the Turkish lira illustrates once again that there’s no such thing as a free lunch in the FX markets and has left speculators well and truly plucked.

The World Cup stoked football fever and passion among fans all over the world but cool-headed investors have been totally unmoved.

Kuwait’s largest project financing to date closed on June 14.

Ever since Kuwait amended its banking legislation in early 2004 to license foreign banks, outside players have continued to show confidence in a high-potential market.

As stock exchange consolidation catches on around the world, it’s sobering to note the lessons of the Australian experience.

Hungary’s fiscal weakness has rating agencies worried. Even before the mid-month downgrading of Hungary’s sovereign debt, Budapest’s equities markets began to adopt the same gloomy outlook as Standard & Poor’s. The government’s debt levels are on track to exceed 74% of GDP by 2009, up from 60% at current levels. High deficit spending is expected to fall just barely, overshadowing noble efforts on the part of Hungary’s socialist-liberal government to consolidate its finances. Central bankers notched up rates by 175 basis points to bolster the forint and stave off inflation risk. This, combined with a tax increase, could significantly hurt growth prospects.

The refinancing of the Grupo Ferrovial takeover of BAA will be a showcase for infrastructure securitization, the first of a number of high-profile deals expected this year.

The first securitization of US home equity loan risk to be denominated in euros came to the market at the end of June via Countrywide Financial.

The recent popularity of bank balance sheet CLOs, ushered in by ABN Amro, HSBC and Barclays Capital at the end of last year, shows no sign of abating. In June alone, RBS, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, Standard Chartered and Sampo were all in the market with deals. These are straightforward balance sheet and regulatory capital management exercises in the run-up to Basle II and as such tend to be large, one-off exercises. Both synthetic, RBS’s Arran Corporate Loans CLO is £3.5 billion equivalent and Deutsche’s London Wall 2006 deal is €3 billion. BNP Paribas’s Global Liberté V is predominantly backed by lending in the US and Canada and is $12 billion while Commerzbank’s CoCo Finance 2006 is a €4.5 billion trade. Standard Chartered’s latest balance sheet CLO references $1.6 billion of loans, and Sampo’s €1 billion Sea Fort Securities is the first CLO from a Finnish bank.

An e-mail has been circulating, purportedly detailing certain phrases unlikely ever to be heard in any sell-side FX trading room. In no particular order, they are:

The CME has announced plans to list futures and options on Chinese renminbi against the US dollar, euro and yen.

Is it time to reconsider the make-up of equity portfolios?

The European Investment Bank has launched a new bond targeted at retail investors that can be sold in all 12 countries in the eurozone. Called eurozone public offering of securities (Epos) the security uses the passporting mechanism that the EU’s prospectus directive introduced last June. The €1 billion 10-year bond is lead managed by Merrill Lynch with a 12-strong syndicate of retail banks – one for each eurozone country. The deal is listed in Luxembourg. It is a lightly structured transaction, offering 5% in the first year and then a multiple of the HICP measure of inflation.

Citigroup’s global head of fixed-income capital markets, Marwan Marshi, left the bank last month to pursue other interests. Marshi, who worked at Citigroup for 20 years, was previously co-head of credit markets alongside Chad Leat until last year when Leat was promoted and gained control of credit trading as well as credit origination and products. Citigroup is not appointing a replacement in Marshi’s role, which had become increasingly redundant. The regional heads of origination that reported to Marshi now simply report to Leat.

Standard & Poor’s new evaluated pricing service joins an increasingly crowded field in the race to improve price transparency in European ABS.

UBS for being voted the best equity research house in Europe in the Thomson Extel Survey for the sixth year in a row. The Swiss bank also got the most votes from institutional investors and sell-side rivals for European equity trading and execution.