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In January, we received news that Jes Staley, the former head of JPMorgan’s investment bank, was leaving the firm to join the hedge fund BlueMountain Capital. This story has several interesting aspects.

In the post-credit-crunch world it is clear that there is a role for a trusted adviser, away from the big firms with all their inherent conflicts of interest. However, there are now a lot of smaller corporate finance firms, so it might be hard to find a niche in this new competitive landscape.

Make love not (currency) war, courtesy of Société Générale's new "sexy" currency index, based on economic growth, interest rates and the current account balances.

The great and the good of the world descended on Davos in Switzerland for their annual love-in high in the mountains last month. Sage sound bites rolled off the tongues of prime ministers, titans of industry and commentators, cascading down the Alps like an avalanche of strategy.

"Euromoney is of course the exception here, but I really do get yanked-off with the UK press in particular banging on about the how dead the European IPO market is. It’s not. It’s alive. There are any number of perfectly good companies out there. You just can’t list rubbish"

The collapse in interest rates means that rich Brazilians will have to grapple with riskier investments offering less liquidity if they are to maintain investment returns. Private bankers are up for the challenge of providing them.

Bankers don’t get a lot of love these days. The industry’s annual awards ceremonies have therefore become a very rare opportunity for them to spend an evening relaxing and enjoying themselves without having to pretend to be estate agents.

Justin Bieber has found himself in a sticky situation thanks to MasterCard. In November last year he agreed to endorse the company’s BillMyParents pre-paid card that is aimed at teenagers. In January he announced that he would use his social network machine to endorse the card. Bieber has some 30 million Twitter followers and 48 million Facebook fans. Not all followers and fans are happy with his choice.

An issue of this magazine published in 1986 that contained several striking historical markers surfaced at Euromoney’s London headquarters last month. In a year when Liverpool were first-division (precursor of the Premier League) champions, Mike Tyson became world heavyweight champion and crooner Chris be Burgh topped the UK charts with his fantastically cheesy ode to a Lady in Red, Euromoney was writing stories about the birth of Canary Wharf and how stock exchanges were losing business to the telephone market.

Over in big bad bank land, the going remains tough. Morgan Stanley was the latest bank to announce big job losses. In January, the firm initiated 1,600 job cuts in addition to the large head-count cull that it undertook last year. Apparently, a large number of managing directors and executive directors will be shown the door in both the investment banking and trading areas. No one grieves when an investment banker loses his or her job. But what people are worrying about is a new compensation scheme that Morgan Stanley announced in mid-January whereby employees earning more than $350,000 in total whose bonuses were at least $50,000 would have 100% of their annual bonus deferred over three years. Lower disposable income on Wall Street affects numerous hangers-on lower down the food chain: think estate agents, car dealers, top-end tailors and watchmakers.

For all the chatter among sell-side analysts on the possibility of the bond markets crashing in the way that they did in 1994 on the Federal Reserve's rate tightening, their buy-side clients appear less concerned.

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) stopped diversifying away from the euro in the fourth quarter, as tensions in the eurozone debt markets eased.