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South Korea’s efforts to weaken its currency by limiting banks’ FX positions will hurt local asset managers’ abilities to buy foreign currency bonds while having a limited impact on controlling the won.

The post-Lehman consensus on the framework is under strain, as the US postpones the January 2013 start date, triggering the ire of EU banks. Competing regulatory agendas in Europe only complicate the process further. As hopes dwindle for a global level playing field, Basle Committee chairman Stefan Ingves touts the virtues of the torturous reform drive.

A focus on the key news and analysis surrounding the eurozone crisis

Commissions and complexity have developed an inverse relationship in the European equities market.

The renminbi (RMB) has dropped two places in the global currency payments tables, driven by a slowdown in the value of institutional transactions, but analysts remain confident that the currency’s global role will expand.

Euphoria over the EUR’s prospects among German corporates after the European Central Bank’s (ECB) launch of the outright monetary transactions (OMT) bond-buying programme in September has evaporated.

Credit Suisse’s Brazilian operation has certainly been successful in distinguishing itself in areas other than equities. This year to date the bank has a staggering 40.8% share of M&A volumes (according to Dealogic), and the dominance in this area masks its real fee performance, with Olympio saying Dealogic has a hard time gauging opaque M&A fees, which he suggests are higher than are credited by the data provider. Olympio hints that a large part of its success in M&A beyond its local contacts is its ability to differentiate itself from the locals that have private equity divisions. "We are a pure provider of services – we don’t do principal investment – which I think gives clients comfort [especially] now that other institutions are moving into private equity and doing principal investments. That sometimes creates a perception of potential conflict."

If there was ever a flicker of hope that Greece could tackle its colossal public debt and return to some form of financial stability then perhaps the country’s estimated $600 billion of natural gas reserves is it.

Can Credit Suisse’s newly promoted CEO of Brazil, José Olympio Pereira, maintain his own and his bank’s high standing in equity capital markets? Euromoney interviews Olympio to find out.

Long-suffering shareholders of UBS can take comfort that JPMorgan’s bank-stock analyst Kian Abouhossein feels their pain. Abouhossein, who is consistently at or near the top of industry rankings of bank analysts, has been an owner of UBS shares while he has touted UBS as his number-one bank-stock pick in recent years and produced price forecasts well above the prevailing market value.

In the past 12 months two global banks have pulled out of equity trading and two European ones have tied up with an independent brokerage to save their ECM businesses. Is the market now poised for fundamental restructuring?

Italy is profoundly caught up in the eurozone crisis, but unlike its peripheral peers, which remain hostage to the international bond markets, the country is able partly to fund its colossal public debt by drawing on formidable and passionate support at home. Could its eurozone peers do the same?