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The passing of the deal to avoid the fiscal cliff in the US opens the way for continued dollar weakness in the short term, while its longer-term prospects have also taken a blow.

Although there are still misgivings about standards of corporate governance in the region, China Telecom stands out in Euromoney’s best-managed Asian companies survey for its principled approach to doing business and dealing with investors.

Financial journalists usually spend the last few weeks of the working year doing the rounds of the banks and investors discussing the outlook for the year ahead.

It was not only banks that endured a tough 2012. As the year drew to a close, some hedge fund managers were also licking their wounds. An insider-trading probe at top US hedge fund SAC Capital is a concern. In late November 2012, the firm said that it might face civil fraud charges from the SEC. Also in 2012, Raj Gupta, a former main board Goldman Sachs director, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for leaking insider information to his friend, and current prison inmate, Raj Rajaratman, co-founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund. And while we are on the subject of Goldman Sachs, did any devoted readers notice that Pierre-Henri Flamand, the former head of the principal strategies group at the US investment bank, quietly closed his European event-driven hedge fund, Edoma, two years after opening it in London with over $2 billion under management. Investors are said to have been less than enamoured of the former golden boy’s performance after the fund lost some 8% of its value.

"I think they’ve gone stark, staring mad"

Banks need to take urgent measures to meet the February 2014 deadline for the establishment of the Single Euro Payments Area, the EU’s flagship cross-border payments system.

"Many banks have gone to considerable lengths in recent years to disclose more information about their risks, but the fact remains that investors tend to see banks as opaque black boxes where risks are still poorly disclosed or – worse – actively obscured by management"

Despite the country’s strong fundamentals and celebrated growth rates in recent years, the economy lost some of its shine in 2012. The government must get over its obsession with the real and concentrate on beefing up productivity and trade, say analysts.