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.

If Silvio Berlusconi and Italy's new centre-right coalition take power they will depend heavily on Milanese tax lawyer and academic Giulio Tremonti to win and maintain the trust of the financial markets.

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

KMV designed its expected default rate charts as a way to make first banks, and now investors, better able to monitor credit risk and trade bonds. Now its data might be the harbinger of doom for the US, which has spent most of the year hoping that a series of interest rate cuts will be enough to salve its ills and stave off recession.

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.

Former assistant secretary of US Treasury for international affairs

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.

New bankruptcy legislation making its way through the US Congress may have unintended consequences that could cause it to backfire on the banking industry.

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

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

More and more Arab banks accept that they must embrace the internet or risk losing share in their home markets to more technology-savvy international players. National banks see the internet as a means to realize their regional ambitions. Change is under way across the region, perhaps most notably in Bahrain, traditionally the key offshore banking centre in the Gulf. Now Islamic banking and investment banking operations are growing up and offshore banking is becoming less prominent. The country’s leading offshore and local banks are rethinking their strategies and hope to become regional players.

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.

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.

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.

Winners and losers reflect on the results.

Brown Brothers Harriman talks about going it alone.

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.

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.

Mr Slobodan Milosevic

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.

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.

Richard Li, chairman of Hong Kong-based Pacific Century Cyber Works (PCCW), is rewriting his CV. But he's not just updating his work experience and leisure activities. He has to make a major alteration to his qualifications.

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.

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?

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

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

Turkey has been suspended on the brink since February 22 when the government floated the lira and ended the 14-month stabilization programme supported by the IMF. The new programme has not been finalized and until it is Turkey will drift in semi-darkness.

The hospitality and tourism industry is one of the biggest in the world, with fierce competition between hotels and airlines to persuade the much-prized business traveller to stay or fly with them. What differentiates the hotels and airlines that these much-sought-after business customers regard as the most desirable? Euromoney polled executives at 115 institutions from all over the world on their favourite hotels – city by city – and their favourite airlines.

The European market for collateralized debt obligations is set to grow significantly this year. This promises to be an area of intense interest for US and UK structured finance lawyers.