Search results for

Chatting with Ajith Cabraal, the amiable governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, in his lofty eyrie above Colombo, one could be forgiven for thinking that he’s presiding over some approximation of a Switzerland-sur-tropique. Although his Indian Ocean homeland is besieged by a civil war escalated by an ambitious president with an advancing personality cult, "things aren’t nearly as bad as they might appear on CNN," Cabraal says.

Investors looking for attractive long-term return potential could do worse than look at bank stocks in southeastern Europe. That’s the conclusion of a recent report by Günther Hohberger and Gernot Jarny, banking analysts at Erste Bank in Vienna. Entitled South east European Banks: Boom or bust? the report looked at the banking sectors in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia, and concluded that overall growth rates for banks in the emerging economies of southeastern Europe versus the more developed markets in central Europe will be higher for the next decade at least.

They are China’s emerging rich: hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs making money hand over fist. They want that money to work hard for them. And they are the target market for a new domestic industry: private banking. Chris Wright reports.

ECBC plenary meeting divided about how to handle market making.

The New Masters of Risk? How insurers are testing out their capabilities in finance

Some of Argentina’s biggest companies are raising finance to invest in the booming agriculture sector in Latin America, on the back of steep rises in soft commodity prices.

The credit crunch is inevitably limiting banks’ ability to offer supply chain finance services. But demand for these is set to keep growing, so the broader effect might be consolidation of the business into the hands of a few truly global banks. Laurence Neville reports.

Highly levered funds are always at the mercy of credit and liquidity suppliers. So be wary of those active in markets where liquidity can rapidly dry up, says Neil Wilson.

One characteristic that both the ABS and leveraged loan markets share – apart from having had a hideous time over the past nine months – is that fledgling indices for both (the ABX and LCDS/LevX respectively) have been subjected to the most testing market conditions in memory very early on in their development.

But CDO managers are paying a premium, especially in the US.

More assets are yet to be hit in the credit crisis and, as leverage continues to fall out of play, liquidity will keep on drying up. Equity prices are bound to fall still further too.

It’s pitiful trying to blame short sellers for the woes of the financial system.