Lehman Brothers found itself at the centre of embarrassing public revelations last month when a chef formerly employed by the bank challenged the terms of his dismissal and implied that loose morals were inherent to the firm's culture.

Citigroup is the most successful cash management bank in nearly every region of the world. But when asked to rank banks on different aspects of the cash management business, treasurers often rate the likes of Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Standard Chartered, and BNP Paribas higher than Citi.

All the global cash management banks continue to concentrate on the small pool of top-tier multinationals where there are opportunities to cross-sell but where competition is most intense. These most demanding of cutomers are driving down margins. The global players might be overlooking other sources of revenue.

A big chunk of Iceland's second-largest bank looks destined to fall to a father and son team who made a fortune from selling their brewery in Russia. Questions remain, though, about their suitability to control the National Bank of Iceland.

The International Accounting Standards Board is planning to change its approach to the treatment of assets in securitizations. But many feel the new proposals don’t improve on the confusion they replace

Hutchison publicly blames its abandonment of a foray into euro bonds on adverse market conditions. But the company and its advisers seem to have neglected to weigh up specific reasons for investor caution.

Banks and opportunity funds are lining up to benefit from an expected transfer of real-estate assets from cash-strapped corporates to investors. There’s one catch – some corporates aren’t in a hurry to sell.

"You should always buy a company that any fool can run, because one day, one will." These were the words of one of the world's most successful investment managers, Peter Lynch, speaking at an awards lunch in London.

The sovereign debt restructuring mechanism is the most contentious proposal ever to come out of the upper echelons of the IMF. It is almost universally opposed by the private sector, most emerging-market borrowers think it a very bad idea indeed, and before it has even been drafted it has already been blamed for tens of billions of dollars of decreased capital flows to emerging markets.

At the start of the year Lucine Kirchhoff took a bold position. The price of high-grade loans, she said, was destined to increase: "Look for investors to focus more on drawn pricing to compensate for the appropriate risk they are taking," said Kirchhoff, the head of loan syndicate at Banc of America Securities. It would be a similar story for undrawn costs. Higher pricing ought to have been inevitable given the recession, a rise in defaults, rating-agency downgrades and fallen angels, and the uncovering of corporate frauds. Banks would surely be looking for a much better return for the risks they were taking, which would imply a wholesale change in prices rather than just a slight increase.

Argentina

Large investment-grade corporate borrowers have increasingly turned to securitization as rating downgrades and investor risk aversion have pushed spreads on normal bonds to junk levels. Can asset-backed markets meet these giant issuers’ funding needs?

Managing director and global head of fixed income e-commerce, Lehman Bros