Russia defaulting on its domestic debt in 1998 might seem like a distant memory, but one economic problem keeps coming up, and is stifling foreign investment: poor corporate governance.

Brown Brothers Harriman talks about going it alone.

Marc Viénot talks about his paris Europlace and life after Société Générale.

Winners and losers reflect on the results.

The development of online foreign exchange trading has lagged behind e-trading of other financial products but optimists predict it will account for 70% of the market by 2004 and 95% by 2012. The advantages are obvious, so why has take-up so far been so slow?

After a nightmare decade of war, sanctions, mismanagement and institutionalized criminality, Serbs are hoping for a speedy deliverance from a mounting economic crisis. Yet despite promises of aid to the post-Milosevic Serbian and federal Yugoslav governments, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. Erik D’Amato reports from the frontlines of the most critical European economic transition since 1991

Faced with rising technology costs and regulatory change, fund managers are seeking to transfer more processes to their global custodians. In doing so, they are presenting service providers with a new set of challenges and opportunities. Rick Butler asks how far the trend to outsourcing can go

Despite having left their previous jobs under controversial circumstances and with no performance track record to call their own, Nicola Horlick, Keith Percy and John Richards have turned SocGen Asset Management into a force in UK fund management in just three years. The results to date are impressive, with nearly all targets reached and 71 mandates under management totalling nearly £7 billion of assets. However, despite their protestations to the contrary, marketing the business through the personalities of the individuals, particularly Horlick, has left many with the impression that it is a top-heavy star firm. Horlick and co are striving to shake off this image as they push towards their next target of £20 billion.

Of the leading multi-dealer sites that will serve the online foreign exchange market, only Currenex and State Street’s Global Link FX Connect services are trading yet. Both Atriax and FXall are yet to complete testing, though both expect to be on stream in the very near future.

The Federal Reserve caught the markets off their guard when it slashed the Federal Funds rate by half a percentage point on April 18.

The most famous face in fund management in the City talks about the fruitless efforts by tabloid newspapers to dig up details of her private life in the wake of her departure from Morgan Grenfell four years ago.

India has built an innovative, fast-growing export industry in IT services, software and equipment thanks to a highly skilled, low-cost workforce. However, the US slowdown has hit share prices of Indian IT companies hard and executives fear it could damage their revenues. Others are more sanguine, pointing out that a newly chastened, cost-conscious IT industry in the US will find India’s value-for-money outsourcing proposition even more attractive.

India's stock markets are reeling from the effects of the crisis in March. The arrest of Ketan Parekh, an influential Mumbai broker, and top officials of a co-operative bank, on charges of defrauding a state bank, confirmed fears that money from banks was used to finance excesses on the stock market.

When Glas Cymru won approval from Ofwat to restructure Welsh Water, it introduced a new model for privatized UK utilities that does away with conventional shareholders. Glas will break new ground by financing its purchase entirely through a securitization. But despite the problems caused by shareholders taking cash out of the industry that the regulator wants to go to customers, many water companies argue that equity still has a role to play in their funding structure. Steve Metcalfe reports on a debate that could force the restructuring of an entire sector and might yield lessons for other utilities

Mexico's bourse looks more like a battleground these days than a financial market.

Smith&Wollensky has come up with the ideal recipe for those bankers and investors who are still smarting, and who are feeling slightly less flush in the wallet department. Despite sounding like a boutique financial firm, Smith&Wollensky is in fact one of New York's premier steakhouses, oft frequented for lunch and dinner by all echelons of Wall Street.

Merrill Lynch Investment Managers’ approach to the US institutional market can best be described as nascent. Until two months ago, there wasn’t even anyone charged with the responsibility for overseeing, developing or even simply describing Merrill’s US institutional business.

Still convinced that their ailing currencies are sick because of the attentions of speculators, Asean finance ministers have agreed a fund for mutual defence through forex market intervention. Most bankers reckon the $1 billion put in the pot is a derisory amount to cope with what is anyway a misdiagnosed condition. Beyond that there’s disagreement on whether Asean currencies have bottomed out or have further to fall.

Former assistant secretary of US Treasury for international affairs

Peter Hancock has made quite a name for himself as a talented banker, skillful innovator and determined risk-taker. So when he addressed Isda's AGM in Washington last month, he was guaranteed a good turnout. But, as the audience quickly realized, Hancock has a talent for saying a lot while giving little away.

After the initial shock following the announcement in March that both Carol Galley and Stephen Zimmerman were to retire this year, it turns out that very little has changed.

While Horlick’s problems were perhaps the most widely documented of the SocGen team, Keith Percy and John Richards also had their own difficulties.

Colleagues describe Jeff Peek as straightforward, engaging, decent, and a man with a clear vision and a good sense of humour.

On March 20, the London financial futures and options exchange, Liffe, introduced a new product called Swapnote. This swap futures contract, the first of its kind, is referenced against the European interbank swap curve instead of the government bond curve. This means that it more accurately reflects the exposures that bondholders experience. It is available at two-, five- and 10-year maturities.

South Africa is a contradictory country. Its economy is the size of Poland's or Thailand's. It has income disparities similar to Brazil's. In population and wage rates, it's Argentina. But it spends three times more of GDP on public education than China and twice as much as the average of all emerging markets.

The strategic resource that Indian IT companies rely on to grow at the recent cracking rate of 50% a year is the country’s pool of 340,000 technical professionals. Yet, if a recent study by consultants McKinsey is to be believed, that pool is not growing fast enough.

On a trip to Baroda, a dusty, remote town in western India, a senior executive from a multinational in Mumbai was astonished to find a small IT company that processes parking tickets for the New York Police Department.

Six months ago, Peru might have been in bad shape, but at least the future looked bright.

It's been another bad month for the European Central Bank, with everyone telling it what to do. Horst Köhler of the IMF said the ECB would have to cut rates to prevent the US recession from spreading. US finance minister Paul O'Neill agreed, and at a meeting in Malmö in Sweden, so did European finance ministers.