The world is starting to resemble a spinning top: one week the markets soar, the next they sink. Even mighty masters of the universe are confused: hedge funds and banks had a dire month in March. And could there be a mightier master than Hank Paulson, the present US Treasury secretary and former Goldman Sachs chief executive?

Mexico is expected to take the first crucial steps towards improving its oil sector and liberalizing aspects of state-owned Pemex’s management. An energy reform proposal was sent to the Mexican congress on April 9 by president Felipe Calderón, and will be voted on shortly. Analysts are confident that the bill will be passed and, despite one opposition party, PRD, claiming this is "back door privatization", key players of the other opposition party, the PRI, support the reform.

The sideways, low-volatility markets of the past two years are gone, so how should investors review their currency management strategies? Should they consider shifting mandates from quant to discretionary? And should capital preservation take over from return maximization?

Growth potential is the buzz-phrase in the central and eastern European private equity market. Many in the market are extolling its virtues, not to mention its returns, but what are the hidden risks? Jethro Wookey reports.

BNP Paribas is presenting MillionTreesNYC in New York, a citywide, public-private scheme with the goal of planting and caring for a million trees across New York’s five boroughs over the next 10 years. Introduced as one of mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 127 PlaNYC initiatives to create a healthier, sustainable city, MillionTreesNYC will increase the city’s tree-count by 20%.

As a new approach to financial PR it may take some time to bed in.

Can the rapid growth of e-trading in recent years continue?

Leading Russian corporates Gazprom and Evraz both attracted strong support for Eurobond issues in April. Gas company Gazprom sold a $1.5 billion five- and 10-year deal via Citi and Morgan Stanley; steel producer Evraz sold $1.6 billion of five- and 10-year paper via ABN Amro, Calyon, Deutsche Bank, and UBS. Both issues were heavily oversubscribed and performed well in aftermarket trading. VTB, the country’s second-biggest bank, is set to follow with a $1 billion issue, the first in a series of transactions that will involve it seeking $4 billion of foreign funding this year.

The Bank of England’s special liquidity scheme does nothing that hasn’t already been done by the Fed and the ECB – except on more onerous terms.

The volume of equity raised in the Middle East so far this year is up 62% on the same period in 2007. Issuers from the region have raised $11 billion-worth of equity year to date, mainly through IPOs, which account for 60% of total volume, up from just 47% in 2007.

According to market participants, cash holdings are at an all-time high among investment managers.

Bad infrastructure, a weak economy and vulnerable financial assets – but bankers in South Africa remain confident.

The crunch has precipitated a world where good credits can turn bad overnight. Research teams must adapt to the new circumstances while clients increasingly have their own expertise. Jethro Wookey reports.

Last month Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, named Roberto Hernández, a long-term member of the Venezuelan Communist Party, as the new labour minister. The decision came days after Chavez ordered the nationalization of a leading steel-making company. The Ternium Sidor steel works was taken over in April after the company refused to raise workers’ pay. Ternium is Argentine-controlled and this nationalization adds strain to the good relations between Chávez and the Argentine government. Chávez also put pressure on relations with the Mexican president last month when he ordered the nationalization of the cement industry, a move that included Cemex’s Venezuelan operations.

Senator talks of progress on the SWF plan, the problems he has faced promoting the idea and why he thinks it will succeed this time.

Russia’s infrastructure will cost trillions of dollars to fix. How are bankers and investors looking to profit from the rebuilding?

ING has released a report on the economic and market implications of US obesity. Entitled The fat of the land, the report looks at possible effects on the US economy of the growing numbers of obese people. In 1980, some 15% of Americans were classified as obese, under the (admittedly questionable) BMI method. By 2004, that figure had risen to about 33%.

Flush with petrodollars and ambitious plans, Nigeria’s banks are coming to London. Guaranty Trust Bank, one of Nigeria’s leading banks, has just been authorized by the UK’s Financial Services Authority to operate as a bank in the UK. Its subsidiary, GTB UK, which is based in Margaret Street in London, will focus on commercial activity in areas where there are already established links between Nigeria and the UK and the other countries where it operates, including Gambia and Sierra Leone. The subsidiary will provide banking services such as receiving deposits and writing mortgages for both commercial and retail customers and intermediates.

Market sources suggest that Advent, a leading private equity firm, is set to exit from its majority stake in Nuevo Banco Comercial, the second-largest privately owned bank in Uruguay. This follows an agreement to sell NBC to the Gilinski family, who own GNB Sudameris, a small commercial bank in Colombia. The deal will probably be concluded this month.

Ukraine’s financial institutions are thriving despite renewed political upheaval. A surge in M&A and IPO activity could be the next stage.

Inter-dealer broker Icap has confirmed that it is trialling and will soon launch an internet-based version of its EBS spot trading platform. EBS Global Access is scheduled for launch by the end of June and the company says it is intended to provide a cost-effective and easy means of accessing the foreign exchange market’s predominant spot liquidity pool. Icap says that all manually traded EBS products – spot FX, precious metals and non-deliverable forwards– will be available on EBS Global Access. Clients will not have to install any hardware and Icap says they will have the same access to the EBS liquidity pool as existing users. While latency is potentially an issue, Icap says that the benefits are reduced telecom costs and time to market. It is estimated that deployment of EBS Global Access will take less than a week.

It has become increasingly recognized that the attraction of flow from the retail aggregators can have a huge impact on the volumes of sell-side institutions.

Millennium BCP used to be the star of Portuguese banking. But a period of destructive internal rivalries, abortive takeover bids and dubious strategies made the firm a basket case. Can a new chief executive – seen as a safe pair of hands – rebuild the bank’s capital and revitalize its growth?

More on LTROs

Sberbank’s chief German Gref has the task of creating a national banking champion for Russia. That includes building a presence overseas.

The US secondary market in life insurance is being extended to sellers who can ill afford to relinquish their policies.

"The problem is that banks have ended up lending to these deals by accident – they thought that they were underwriting them"

Kazakhstan’s banks have built up onerous debt repayments after a splurge of Eurobond issuance. Are they facing a liquidity crunch?

Non-performing loans in Mexico are growing at a worrying pace. Despite official estimates putting consumer NPLs at 5.8% of the total consumer loan market, some analysts believe that real levels are in double digits already.

Retail FX provider Oanda is building up its presence in Asia following the recent appointment of K Duker as its managing director for Asia Pacific. The company has hired Maxine Loh, formerly a marketing director at UBS; Zena Tong, formerly a senior sales executive at Saxo Bank; and Tracey Tan, who was a senior customer service executive at Bloomberg, to work out of its Singapore office.