“Enter the scotch-drinking, table-dancing, back-stabbing world of stocks and bonds.”

This year the annual UBS financial institutions’ summer conference was held in Valencia just as the football World Cup was starting.

Euromoney’s Global Borrowers and Investors Conference last month brought the great and the good of the world’s fixed income markets together in London for the 15th year in a row.

The cost of raising tier 1 capital has increased on both sides of the Atlantic, but there might be light at the end of the tunnel.

All the fundamentals are in place for rapid expansion of the Mexican MBS market. When financing structures are fine-tuned, foreign investors should move in to boost growth. Felix Salmon reports.

Greater liquidity is expected to flow into the Russian debt markets after the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, successfully pushed for rouble convertibility to be brought forward from January 1 2007 to July 1.

The US investment bank’s move points to a greater focus on the FIG hybrid capital sphere from its DCM coverage teams.

Asia’s private banking ranks continue to swell as a benign market lures in more entrants. Costs are escalating and so is product pricing. Market growth may yet hide banks’ hubris but any reversal in trends could leave some dangerously exposed. Chris Leahy reports.

In an interesting reversal, Robert Palache is to join Morgan Stanley, the firm from which he poached a high-profile three-man CMBS team in 2003. At the time Palache was head of real estate, corporate securitization and infrastructure finance at Barclays Capital, and hired Lynn Gilbert, Christian Janssen and Natalie Howard from Morgan Stanley’s CMBS team to build up its CMBS Conduit, Eclipse. Now Palache, who walked out of BarCap in March this year, joins Morgan and reports to John Hyman and Ellen Brunsberg, the woman from whom he poached Gilbert and team in 2003. In his new role, Palache will focus on further developing the bank’s securitization origination business in Europe in areas such as infrastructure, whole business and new asset securitizations.

With some institutional investors still indecisive about allocating investments to hedge funds, and some still struggling to get to grips with portable alpha, it’s a relief to know that others are so ahead of the curve that they are putting the two elements together.

Barclays Capital has expanded its electronic trading platform to offer secondary market liquidity in all the bank’s equity structured note offerings.

Morgan Stanley has hired Gary Cottle as head of corporates in its European global capital markets business. He will be responsible for corporate debt and derivatives, enterprise risk management, liability management and transaction management. Cottle resigned in mid-March from Barclays Capital, where he was head of corporate risk advisory for the EMEA region. During his time at BarCap, Cottle built a well-regarded corporate and sovereign derivative franchise.

The merger of Caisse d’Epargne’s and Banque Populaire’s investment banks and asset managers opens up the possibility of even more consolidation in France.

The US bank confirms its top position in the league tables.

The CIS markets offers lucrative investment opportunities despite the broader emerging markets sell-off.

The real test of Goldman Sachs’s new model will come in a prolonged downturn.

The structured credit market desperately needs new and different buyers of equity tranches to avoid an eventual sharp and painful sell-off.

After an adverse court judgement, any attempt to revive the SEC’s 2005 ruling on hedge fund regulation looks unlikely to succeed unless a so far indifferent Congress is spurred into action.

Corporate hybrid bonds are living up to expectations of poor performance in a bearish market.

The panel for the second session at Standard Chartered’s China and Africa forum had already faced some tough questions on poverty and corruption, so they must have been uneasy when the Standard Chartered banker who popped up at the last minute took an even tougher line.

Simplify, simplify, simplify. Thoreau’s mantra is good advice for rating agencies when it comes to allocating equity credit.

Euromoney congratulates those that have won this year, and challenges those that came close to make our decisions even harder in 2007.

All banks have to deal with non-performing loans (NPLs) and delinquent debtors. In Indonesia, a market with weak bankruptcy laws, rampant corruption and family-controlled corporations, the problem is serious.

Little-known London-based Cheviot Asset Management has poached 50 investment management professionals from UBS and other leading investment firms as it relaunches itself as an independent private client asset management group.

South Africa’s securitization market has developed so rapidly that it has today reached a level of sophistication that the US and Europe took more than 20 years to achieve, according to consultancy firm Deloitte. And the emergence of bank balance-sheet transactions is set to keep bankers busy in coming months.

Key structural alterations have been made to UBS’s fixed-income business that involve the vertical integration of sales and trading in four product areas: investment-grade credit, MBS/ABS, European government/Libor derivatives, and US Libor flow derivatives.

One of the more successful hedge funds in Latin America, Copernico Capital Partners, is sitting on the sidelines as the market volatility continues, having presciently disbursed most of its Argentine holdings back to investors in April.