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After years of hearing about banks giving away both their liquidity and their credit too cheaply, the situation appears to be starting to change. The demise of Lehman has removed a serious and well-respected e-commerce operation. This appears to have encouraged certain banks to widen their spreads out this week. For the moment, though, there are still others prepared to carry on with business as normal. There have also been rumours about changes in the prime brokerage landscape, which is inevitable. Given what’s happened, it won’t be too surprising if both credit and liquidity are repriced.

In this age of electronic trading, few market particpants have any idea of the identities of their peers at other institutions, but the head-hunters do.

Lloyds Bank, now Lloyds TSB, used to proudly proclaim it could be found at the sign of the Black Horse. At Midland, we used to laugh that it was more like a dead donkey, although I suppose the fact that the Lloyds’ donkey outlived the Midland’s griffin shows our mirth was misplaced.

I’ve recently had my anorak on and I’ve been looking at the euro repo market. And it strikes me as a bit of a coincidence that none of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Northern Rock and HBOS was a member of Eurex Repo.

I’ve long believed that potential employers are put off by my CV. To cut a long story short, quite a few of the companies I’ve worked for no longer exist. The list includes Midland Bank, First Interstate Bank of California (I was only there nine days, so it hardly counts anyway), Nomura Bank (a technical detail), TheStreet.co.uk and BridgeNews. It seems that I’m a bit of a Jonah, so I am obviously grateful to my esteemed editor at Euromoney for giving me the opportunity to feed the black hole, otherwise known as my bank account.

GL Trade, the multi-asset trading solutions vendor, has announced that its main shareholders have accepted rival SunGard’s offer to acquire it for €41.70 per share. The shareholders, Euronext Paris, Gagnières and Pierre Gatignol, Louis-Christophe Laurent and Frédéric Morin control 64.52% of the company’s share capital. SunGard will now launch an all-cash tender offer for the remainder of GL Trade’s share capital.

The ever-affable Lars Hakanson has moved across from his role as global head of FX at Société Générale and will join the group’s private banking business. Not too many details are available at the moment but, effective immediately, Chico Khan-Gandapur, the bank’s head of flow business, will oversee all sales activities. Serge Topolanski, deputy head of flow business, will take over all FX trading responsibilities.

Options specialist SuperDerivatives has hired the well-regarded Ravit Mandel to lead its product management function. Mandel, who will be based in New York, was formerly global head of rates at Citi, where she was responsible for the option and swap desks, exotics trading and the structuring desk, mortgage backed securities, CMO trading, and government and agency bonds trading.

Barclays Capital has launched its Adaptive FX Trend Index. The bank says that trend strategies are one of the central sources of return in FX markets, but that there are very few liquid, transparent and easily investible indices available to invest in. The portfolio invests in G10 currencies and rebalances daily.

Chief executive officer, Asia Pacific.

A proposal to ease the launch of exchange-traded funds that is before the Securities and Exchange Commission will help to propel growth in the industry

......drink heavily and re-cycle