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.

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

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.

Banking analysts are starting to ring alarm bells about Brazil – in recent months there has been a rapid increase in consumer lending by local banks, but this came hand in hand with a large increase in the non-performing loan market.

UniCredit stole a march on its banking rivals in late June with the signing of an agreement to buy at least 85% of Kazakhstan’s fifth-largest financial services provider, ATF Bank. The roughly $2.2 billion transaction will catapult the Italian bank to the top of the foreign bank pile in the oil-rich central Asian republic, with UniCredit leapfrogging such rivals as Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and ING, which all have long-established operations in the country.

Oil firms Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips have pulled out of Venezuela following president Hugo Chávez’s latest round of nationalizations, in which he proposed huge increases in state participation in projects run by the two US companies and four others.

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.

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.

Global Maritime Investments fund has annualized net returns of more than 30%. Founder/partner Steve Rodley of manager M2M explains to Helen Avery how shipping hedge funds are meeting investor demand for diversification and performance.

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

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

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.

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

Big potential seen in mobile communications and financial services.

Emerging markets remain the primary driver of hedge fund returns for 2007 so far, but all of HFI’s indices continue to outperform the MSCI index in the long term.

Although most analysts failed to predict it, the decision by the National Bank of Poland’s monetary policy committee to increase its benchmark seven-day intervention rate on June 27 by a quarter point to 4.50% had only a marginal impact in the market. The zloty strengthened, as might have been expected, but there was only an extremely modest sell-off in the bond markets, particularly at the long end. Most activity took place at the short end of the yield curve.

As some banks – and a tiny few aspirant young bankers – have realized, there’s good business to be built in the out-of-fashion traditional investment-grade debt capital markets.

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.

In June, investors began to reject low returns on subordinated structures such as PIK toggle notes from riskier issuers. It will be tougher for sponsors to pile more debt on their already leveraged acquisitions. But public company managers aren’t free from the private equity threat.

Jack Jeffery, chief executive of electronic broking at Icap, quit the broker almost a year to the day after its purchase of EBS. Jeffery, who was parachuted into EBS from Citi in February 2002, had overseen EBS’s integration into Icap, which moved swiftly to replace him, announcing that market veteran John Nixon had assumed the role.

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

The third draft of Italy’s covered bond legislation has been published.

As covered bond markets continue to thrive worldwide, it appears that the demands of ratings agencies might be becoming a stumbling block.

S&P stance tempers optimism.

Rob Lichten has left his role as global head of FX sales and trading at JPMorgan to take what the bank described as a long sabbatical. His decision came after the bank decided to merge its G10 FX and rates businesses and combine all its emerging markets into its wider EM platform. The bank later announced that Chris Willcox and Matt Zames would co-head global rates and currency trading, excluding Asia ex-Japan.

All the global players have a presence in Australia, which is the fourth-largest asset management market in the world. Chris Wright looks at their strategies.

New service aims to introduce competitive auction for programme trades.

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