Standard & Poor’s has begun assigning recovery ratings to the debt of 16 speculative-grade-rated Mexican corporations, as global investors are forced to place more focus on the recovery of principal after a borrower’s potential default.

A week after Lehman Brothers collapsed, the United Arab Emirates central bank announced a new credit line of a dirham equivalent of $14 billion. Was it a signal to investors that the federation would not sit by and watch as the economy of Dubai – its second-biggest constituent – went into free fall?

President of Panama’s Bolsa de Valores expects new exchange to be created next year.

Colombia’s financial institutions continue to be in good shape. They expect record profits for 2008, despite the global turmoil. For the first seven months of 2008, the Colombian banking system reported a net profit of $1.43 billion, a 30.9% increase on the same period in 2007. "Last year was a record year for Citi Colombia in terms of profit and growth, but we expect to close this year with even better profit growth rates," says Francisco Aristeguieta, country head of Citi Colombia and head of the Andean region for Citi.

One deal apologists for Lehman Brothers might not cite was its raising almost $300 million for an island nation of just 80,000 people. Indeed, the Seychelles looks a likely candidate for the title of Africa’s first sovereign Eurobond defaulter of the new millennium.

For so long seen as a banking backwater, cash management’s time has come. Revenues are high-margin, stable and growing. Products such as liquidity management will only grow in importance. And, with the huge client bases involved for the biggest players, it’s a gateway into a lot of other business. Laurence Neville reports.

The Lehman Brothers website, may have provided a little insight as to why the bank collapsed last month. According to the Life at Lehman, People section of the website, one employee called Margot at the bank was surprised she made the grade:

JPMorgan stopped counterparty trading with Citadel last month in protest at the $20 billion hedge fund’s recent hires of the bank’s staff. Employees at JPMorgan were told to stop trading stocks, bonds and currencies with Citadel. However, the dispute lasted only 24 hours. Both parties declined to comment but sources say relations between the two firms began to sour in March, when Patrik Edsparr left JPMorgan to run Europe and fixed income for Citadel. There have been several other hires from JPMorgan since that time, more lately Brian McDonald, formerly a managing director and senior portfolio manager with the US bank’s ABS Principal Investments Group. The final straw, though was the hire of Greg Boester, an adjustable-rate mortgage securities trader with the bank.

As the financial turmoil claims its latest victims, holders of covered bonds see the strength of their investments.

On September 29 the Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced its most severe one-day decline in history. Of the S&P index’s 500 names, just one enjoyed a share price rise:

The financial crisis has finally taken its toll on the money markets.

Several of Deutsche Bank’s clients had problems with the pricing they were getting electronically when they have came to roll positions forward at the end of September. When these have been queried on the telephone, the prices have apparently been requoted more accurately in line with prevailing rates in the market.

The failure of the US House of Representatives to pass the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 at its first reading on September 29 came despite the entreaties of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association to its members to call their congressmen before noon that day to explain to them why the legislation must pass.

Bank failures used to be massive news. But with so many cropping up these days they have, like world records at the Beijing Olympics, lost something of their shock value. How then to judge which have made the biggest waves?

Is the new Nomura a threat to the dominant investment banks in the Asia-Pacific region?

Eurasia Capital Management (ECM) has created the first-ever Uzbekistan-dedicated hedge fund. The Uzbekistan Growth Fund was launched in September with initial capital of just $5 million but ECM founder and managing partner Alisher Ali Djumanov believes that the open-ended investment vehicle could grow substantially over the next couple of years.

At the beginning of 2007, Euromoney wrote that the retail lending boom in the Balkans was putting pressure on the region’s banking systems and that cooperation between banks and authorities was vital. But as the world’s economic downturn pushes into southeastern Europe, that warning might be going unheeded. Jethro Wookey reports.

Fortis announced in a statement on September 30 that it would not complete a planned sale of 50% of its asset management business to China’s Ping An. The recently part-nationalized Belgian/Dutch group cited "the current severe market disruption and the ongoing uncertainty in the global capital markets" as the reason for pulling the deal, which would have been worth $3 billion. Fortis will instead retain 100% control of Fortis Investments, which has now completely integrated ABN Amro’s asset management business.

Broadly, hedge funds began to feel the full effects of market turmoil in the second half of 2008, although pockets of outperformance persist. Neil Wilson identifies the strategies likely to do best in a transformed market.

The CDS market is trying to withstand the strain of three almost simultaneous counterparty defaults.

Even Kazakh bank employees are joining investors in a flight to quality away from the sector. BTA Bank and Kazkommertzbank are overwhelmed by foreign debt too eagerly lent out at home and only Halyk is in good shape. Although there are still a few potential foreign buyers nosing around Kazakh financial assets, Raiffeisen for one has decided that its ambitions in the country will be best fulfilled through a greenfield operation. Elliot Wilson reports.

The growth in Islamic finance has slowed with the deepening credit crunch but the Saudi Binladin Group has raised the first sukuk for the world’s most holy boom town: Mecca.

A week, they say, is a long time in politics. We now know that a week can be an eternity in the financial markets, especially when it starts with Lehman Brothers going bust and ends with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley becoming licensed deposit takers so that they can snuggle closer to the Federal Reserve. Oh, and in between, you had the rescue of the largest US insurance company, AIG and the proposed Stalinization of US capitalism financed by the Land of the Free’s taxpayers.

International market access not yet certain.

Longevity risk is a continuing, ever changing problem for pension schemes, determining the assets they have to deploy to cover their liabilities. Seven specialists look at how risk is identified and the different techniques and products available to cope with it.

Despite initial fears, the foreign exchange market appears to have handled Lehman Brothers’ collapse into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection remarkably well. According to Rob Close, chief executive of CLS Bank, which settles the bulk of the market’s transactions, few deals that had Lehman as a counterparty were rescinded.

"I’m nothing like Howard Hughes. He was something of an eccentric. I have a very normal life"

Surely it was high time Lloyds TSB made a life-changing acquisition? Surely it had the balance sheet to do so? And surely assets were available at a never-to-be-repeated price? Philip Moore put these questions to Lloyds’ finance director less than a month before its shotgun wedding with HBOS. It’s clear that making a transformational deal for the UK bank was only a matter of time.

Having brushed with Indonesian politics, Gita Wirjawan knows how dirty it can be. Business development has more to offer his country, he reckons, hence his Indonesia-centric private equity business Ancora, which is attracting investors from the wider Muslim world. Eric Ellis reports.