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The relaunch of FX futures by Ice finally provides the CME with some proper competition.

One of the curiosities of the financial meltdown has been the conspicuous absence of China’s leading commercial banks and brokerages in picking up bargains from the wreckage.

Chris Lees has been officially unveiled as the new head of financial institutions group origination in debt capital markets at Citi. He reports to Eirik Winter, head of DCM EMEA. Lees previously spent much of his career at Citi in the European syndicate team where he worked in the high-grade sector. His appointment fills a gap in the origination wall chart at Citi since Alan Patterson moved to run its capital markets product group in March 2007.

Emerging markets have driven global growth in recent years and are expected to continue to outpace the developed world as global growth slows.

Market share expected to be more evenly spread.

Millennium Global Investments has been awarded a A$450 million ($370 million) active currency overlay mandate by Vision Super, the A$4.3 billion Australian superannuation fund. The fund manages defined contribution and defined benefit schemes on behalf of 100,000 members and provides superannuation and retirement incomes to local government authorities, primarily in the State of Victoria.

White labelling and third-party provision have been a perennial red herring in cash management but the credit crunch might finally be the spur to them taking off. By depressing bank revenues and consequently putting pressure on technology budgets – often the first thing to be cut in tough times – banks will simply have to operate differently in order to stay in the market.

Exchanges try to steal a march on their rivals.

JPMorgan has unveiled a new e-commerce offering. Developed internally, the platform, MorganDirect, can be used to trade spot, forwards and outrights from either desktops or BlackBerries, 24 hours a day. MorganDirect will provide streaming rates for more than 300 currency pairs and the bank says that other products and assets will be added in due course. Elsewhere, JPMorgan has replaced AIG as the central counterparty on Currenex’s FXTrades platform.

Cash management for financial institutions is broadly similar in terms of the kinds of products provided by banks to corporates. Moreover, product development is usually combined in a centralized group that takes input from both FIs and corporates so that new products generate maximum value, although, of course, some solutions are developed for different markets, albeit often using the same underlying technology.

Data provider Markit announced at the end of September that it was planning to offer free access to its daily CDS pricing data to non-clients for a limited time. It also announced that buy-side accounts that wanted to confirm index trades would be given free access to its RED (reference entity database) system – again for a limited time. This largesse follows Markit’s decision earlier this year to offer free access to RED for buy-siders that only trade lightly in the CDS market. The moves will be welcomed by the smaller, second-tier institutions involved in the CDS market that have struggled to get access to information following the credit events at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and WaMu.

Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, ordered the US ambassador, Patrick Duddy, to leave the country last month. Chávez accused the Bush administration of planning a coup to overthrow him. Alleged conspirators have been detained. The Venezuelan president also recalled his envoy in Washington. Chávez said: "When there is a new government in the US, we’ll send an ambassador." These moves came shortly after the US government expelled the Bolivian ambassador after the Bolivians sent the US ambassador home. Chávez is a close ally of Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales. Both are antagonists of president George W Bush.