In the July 2007 edition of Euromoney, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis gave a rare in-depth interview. Lewis said: "We are not believers in the build it and they will come mantra. We need to look our shareholders in the eye". "In time, we want to be one of the top five investment banks in the world". More than 18 months ago Euromoney said: "Bank of America is at a tipping point. Ken Lewis is about to face his biggest challenge yet." Little did we know how great the challenge would be. Re-read the story here

Its pivotal role in the most important transactions of a hectic year in M&A makes Goldman Sachs the outstanding player in the most competitive market of all.

John Mack has the job he always wanted. One of Wall Street’s leading firms has the leader it desperately needed. Morgan Stanley is now the investment bank with momentum. Mack and his senior management tell Clive Horwood how they revived the firm’s fortunes.

Find out which institutions have excelled this year in providing high-quality products and services across all areas of commercial and investment banking.

A new index might increase both liquidity and volatility.

Pravin Mouli has left his position as head of Morgan Stanley’s Latin American derivatives trading business to run Latin America trading with Javier Timerman at Bear Stearns’ New York office. Meanwhile Juan Martin, ABN Amro’s head of loan syndication, has left the Dutch bank for a similar role at Deutsche Bank. And Sandy Flockhart, president and group managing director for Latin America and the Caribbean at HSBC, is moving to Hong Kong to become the bank’s Asia CEO.

A basket approach to pricing currencies could help curb Gulf inflation.

The world economy is set to keep growing fast for the next few months. But this will take an inevitable toll on the cost of capital, which is already rising.

In a move that demonstrates the broadening appeal of Russian assets, HSBC Investments has launched the first pure Russian equity fund for Japanese investors, raising more than $150 million since launching a marketing campaign at the end of March.

Who is there to save the day when hedge funds have a blow-up? Why, it’s other hedge funds, which can make a profit clearing up the mess.

Numbers of specialists up 63%, to over 300 since Sept ‘05.

The UK’s Financial Services Authority has granted CME the status of a recognized overseas clearing house. This will allow it to clear products that are not traded on the centralized markets run by the CME in the US, including currency forwards.

Standard & Poor’s has launched the S&P BRIC Shariah Index, aiming to give it a bigger share of the fast-growing Islamic finance market. The new index is designed to cover the largest and most liquid stocks in Brazil, Russia, India and China that meet Shariah law investment criteria and that trade on developed market exchanges – the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the London Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. Standard & Poor’s already offers Shariah-compliant versions of its most widely used global indices – the S&P 500, the S&P Europe 350 and the S&P Japan 500, as well as the S&P GCC Middle East Shariah Index Series. "The S&P BRIC Shariah Index feeds into the already powerful line-up of Islamic indices launched over the past six months by Standard & Poor’s," says Alka Banerjee, vice-president of Standard & Poor’s Index Services. "Each of the constituents within the S&P BRIC Shariah Index is liquid and completely hedgeable. As a result, we are already seeing clients create mutual funds and structured products based upon the index." To be eligible for inclusion in the S&P BRIC Shariah Index, companies must first be constituents of the S&P/IFCI Index for Brazil, Russia, India and China. Constituents are then screened for Shariah compliance based on proprietary sector and financial ratios. Only those stocks deemed Shariah-compliant are retained for the final universe of the index. All S&P Shariah indices are screened by Ratings Intelligence Partners, a Kuwait consulting company.

Commodities offer a means of diversifying investment portfolios, and of bringing down volatility. They can also offer good returns to the savvy investor. But the markets still have some way to go in terms of increasing sophistication.

June marks the beginning of the hurricane season in the Caribbean, and every year there’s a chance that any given island will suffer devastating losses to infrastructure, property and life.

S&P this June launched the new S&P Pan Asia Shariah Index, a new addition to its Global Shariah Index Series.

ANZ combined a number of features on its latest tier-1 deal that allowed it to cut the premium an issuer normally pays to access institutional investors without a coupon step-up at the call date. The £450 million ($898 million) tier-1 perpetual paper was ANZ’s first sterling capital security.

"My only expectation is that I am going to continue to work my ass off"

One of the most puzzling aspects of Asia’s headlong economic growth has been the conspicuous absence of inflation. Despite net foreign exchange inflows of more than $2 trillion since 2000, money supply and credit growth have actually fallen sharply in Asia.

As margin lenders to the two struggling Bear Stearns hedge funds High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Master Fund and High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Master Fund scrambled to avert losses in late June, another vehicle with links to the funds was facing up to problems of its own. Everquest Financial, which was recently formed by Bear Stearns (and had filed a registration with the SEC on May 9 to list), is one of a raft of new listed permanent capital vehicles that have been investing in the equity and first-loss parts of structured credit investments and been hailed as a vital new source of liquidity in this market.

Brazil’s Bradesco has raised $500 million in a securitization structured by ABN Amro. The notes were issued in two tranches of $250 million, with the 2007-1 series receiving triple-A ratings and the 2007-2 series rated at A– and Baa1 by S&P and Moody’s respectively. The notes are due in May 2014.

The launch of faster, higher-capacity systems by exchanges will make life harder for ATSs.

According to a study by Greenwich Associates, funds of hedge funds are beating high-net-worth individuals and family offices as a source of assets for hedge funds with more than $1 billion in assets under management. HNWIs and family offices contribute 21% of assets, while FoHFs contribute 25%. Pension funds, endowments and foundations directly investing comprise 25%. US institutional allocations to hedge funds are now at more than double the 2001 level, says Greenwich. Some 36% of US institutions invest in hedge funds.

The storm clouds that were once on the horizon are now overhead.

The launch of further FX indices by Citi and Axa underlines the acceptance of FX as an asset class, which has attractions across the entire investment spectrum.

Telefónica has successfully closed the largest multi-tranche Czech koruna bond issue by a foreign corporate. The main purpose of the transaction was to extend the company’s investor base to Czech investors – a move the Spanish telephone company has been interested in since its arrival in the Czech Republic after it acquired a majority stake in the country’s main telecom operator, Cesky Telecom, in mid-2005.

Private financing and the crossover space between debt and equity is an increasingly attractive area of business for investment banks. Already a player in the sector, Deutsche Bank is making a renewed push for dominance in Asia with a significant hiring programme.

110 the percentage increase in SEC-registered ECM volume from the mining sector year-to-date. Mining companies have raised $6.7 billion via 11 deals so far this year, compared with $3.2 billion via nine deals over the same period in 2006.

New head of European flow credit trading; new head of European investment-grade trading.

Broker/dealer Louis Capital Markets is recommending auction houses as investment of the month. Sotheby’s, it says, is benefiting from the "soaring fortunes of the ultra-rich". The firm is auctioning works by Monet, Matisse, Warhol and Bacon in July that should – after rises in commission rates earlier this year – significantly increase auctioneer’s earnings.