"Once you get a contract, unless you screw it up, you get the renewal"

A year ago, fund managers and analysts were confidently predicting as many as seven landmark IPOs on Vietnam’s stock exchanges in 2007, raising as much as $1 billion each.

Barclays Capital is further expanding its equity origination business with the appointment of William Ortner from Citi to its New York office as managing director in equity product origination. Ortner is the latest of several new hires that Barcap has made this year to its equity origination business. He was most recently a managing director responsible for corporate equity derivatives at Citi.

Buried deep in the announcement of Morgan Stanley’s third-quarter earnings results was a substantial hit from the bank’s newly built hedge funds business.

Rumours that RBC Capital Markets had let go up to 40 sales and trading officials in the US were firmly denied by officials at the Canadian bank, who refused to comment on possible redundancies.

UBS has continued the revamping of its European debt capital markets business instigated by Roberto Isolani – who became head of fixed-income capital markets, for EMEA and APAC, at the start of this year.

Goldman Sachs knows how to spot an opportunity.

After the crash, here comes CASH

"Interest rate cuts will be like Viagra – an artificial stimulus that doesn’t cure the underlying problem"

CMBS conduit lenders in Europe might be forced to return to the market to shed inventory.

Absolute Capital Management is restructuring five of its equity hedge funds following the departure of co-chief executive officer Florian Homm, which prompted in excess of $100 million of redemption requests for funds with up to $530 million invested in illiquid US stocks quoted on over-the-counter bulletin boards. Chief executive Jonathan Treacher calls the affair "a significant distraction".

Flotation gives big boost to Zagreb market.

The fallout from sub-prime worries in the US has cast a pall over the equity issuance plans of Russian companies in the wake of the volatility that rocked global stock markets over the summer.

The developments will heat up the battle between Qatar and Dubai to become the Middle East’s financial centre.

Lebanon’s economy is crumbling. Its public debt is breaking new world records. It has been teetering on the brink of civil war for the past 10 months. But none of this has stopped Dubai-based Shuaa Capital, one of the Middle East’s leading investment banks, opening a branch this September in Beirut. Why?

A prolonged liquidity contraction is irrevocable, whatever happens in the spuriously autonomous real economy.

Cash management is a hugely attractive business for the banks that have ended up at the top of the consolidation pile, with earnings stability and high returns on equity. And despite reductions in activity because of such developments as the Single Euro Payments Area, new business is emerging in white-labelled products and financial supply chain management. Laurence Neville reports.

As the loan market revives, both buyers and sellers are struggling to establish the upper hand.

More on CLS from The weeklyFiX

The industry collectively did not cover itself in glory during the August/September correction. But there is now a rich environment for a wide range of strategies, says Nick Evans, editor of EuroHedge.

Authoritative Triennial Central Bank Survey confirms FX volumes have grown at an astonishing rate.

Corporate market emerges from intensive care.

Pfandbrief issuers were notable by their absence as the covered bond market descended into chaos.

Write-downs in the leveraged loan market can raise more questions than they answer.

Opportunities are growing for distressed debt and equity investors in the region despite record levels of private equity fundraising.

Northern Rock’s Granite master trust did launch a deal in September – but Granite Master Issuer 2007-3 was a far cry from what the market had been expecting just a matter of months ago.

Just over a year on from the initial launch of its marketindex platform in Germany (see Euromoney July 2006), ABN Amro has decided to enter the highly competitive UK retail market. The bank launched marketindex, which is white-labelled from Oanda, in mid-September. The platform provides streaming two-way prices in various currencies, equity indices, commodities and bonds. For legal reasons, these are designated as contracts for difference (CFDs), although in reality there is very little difference from trading the underlying cash products. ABN Amro will act as counterparty to all trades, although all prices are sources directly from Oanda.

The credit crunch has made life especially difficult for the credit portfolio managers charged with hedging commercial banks’ massive corporate loan portfolios. Lack of liquidity in credit default swaps and the closure of the CLO market has greatly reduced their arsenal of hedging tools. It’s not all bad news though. Wild market conditions have underscored the importance of actively hedging loan books and served to justify portfolio management groups’ existence to banks’ top management.

It’s not often that you can walk onto a trading floor and are greeted by England cricket legend Mike Atherton, twinkle toes Mark Ramprakash, champion jockey Frankie Dettori and Olympics silver medallist boxer Amir Khan.

A senior Citi official in Latin America says that Brazil’s leading local banks will remain independent despite rumours that foreign banks, including Citi itself, could be sizing up a potential acquisition. One banker in São Paulo told Euromoney recently that he reckoned that Brazil’s three big local banks – Bradesco, Itaú and Unibanco – could become targets for global banks, such as Citi, as they bid to increase their presence in Latin America’s most important market.