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The future shape of the UK mortgage finance market remains uncertain despite the publication on November 25 of former HBOS chief executive James Crosby’s report, which recommends the introduction of a £100 billion government guarantee for mortgage-backed bonds to be issued in 2009 and 2010.

The European secondary loan market was bracing itself for a painful year-end in December as balance-sheet-driven forced selling started to bite.

The decline in valuations in developed markets is causing some investors to take another look at opportunities in the US and UK but not necessarily at the expense of emerging market allocations.

The Eurasian Development Bank has admitted Belarus, Armenia and Tajikistan. According to the bank’s chairman, Igor Finogenov, the admission of new member states will enhance the wider geographic expansion of the bank’s investment activities. According to the founding documents of the bank – which was established in January 2006 by Kazakhstan and Russia – any country or international organization can apply for membership.

The president of the European Central Bank is at the centre of the global financial storm. He knows his actions are crucial to the survival of the entire global financial system. He gives his most in-depth interview since the collapse of Lehman Brothers to Clive Horwood and Mark Johnson.

When it comes to retaining clients, hedge funds can’t win at the moment.

The key challenge for both corporates and financial issuers will be the $650 billion in bonds falling due this year, up from $560 billion in 2008.

The CME has hired Mark Thompson as a director. His main task will be to look after the exchange’s hedge fund clients on the US’s eastern seaboard. Thompson, who joins the exchange from UBS, will be based in New York and report to Tina Lemieux, the exchange’s managing director, hedge funds and broker services.

Five years ago, Euromoney was catching up over lunch with a senior figure at a large European bank. Something was troubling him. His private bankers were reporting that emissaries from a large US-based hedge fund had been approaching wealthy European clients telling them that they had unearthed a secret formula to extract regular, risk-free returns from the stock markets.

A year ago Gulf economies were touted as being so uncorrelated with those of the rest of the world that they had little to fear from the credit crunch. Now even Dubai – which for so long seemed to operate under different economic forces from the rest of the planet – is facing a property crash.

Irish divestment would be severe test for weakened loan market.

TraderTools has unveiled a compact keyboard, the AI-1, which it says will simplify the trading process. It comes with extra-large, colour-coded keys that should prove extremely useful for those old spot dealers who have delayed their retirement because of the lack of a bonus in 2008. The keyboard can be connected to a wide range of trading platforms. I did suggest to TraderTools that it should launch a version with a ‘mom tick’ button for all the snipers that still exist in the market, but apparently there’s not that great a demand for it any more in spot. In options, though, it’s a different matter.