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Nobody expects it to get any easier, especially if January’s figures for Europe and Asia are any indication of the future, says Neil Wilson.

Structured products debate: New challenges in structured products

Brazil’s private bankers are eagerly seeking out the means to differentiate themselves from rivals and attract the rich shoal of high-net-worth individuals a market boom has created.

New accounting rules designed to improve transparency and disclosure were bound to increase noise on financial institutions’ balance sheets. But now they are adding to the credit crunch.

Eloy Garcia spent 35 years at the Inter-American Development Bank, most recently as a treasurer, before retiring last year. Now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, he tells Sudip Roy of the enormous challenges the bank and the Latin American region have faced and the progress made.

Funds that offer private banking clients’ portfolio returns are being launched in March by the creators of the FTSE Private Banking Index series.

Credit Suisse’s convoluted saga is a calamity for the banking sector as a whole. People might assume that banks don’t understand the numbers they are dealing with and that the numbers that are reported are not reliable.

Private equity in Turkey is finally gaining momentum. For the country’s first independent private equity firm, launching its second fund, it’s not a moment too soon.

To obtain the overall country risk score, Euromoney assigns a weighting to nine categories. These are political risk (25% weighting), economic performance (25%), debt indicators (10%), debt in default or rescheduled (10%), credit ratings (10%), access to bank finance (5%), access to short-term finance (5%), access to capital markets (5%), and forfaiting (5%).

Just as Thailand has entered a period of rare political calm and optimism with a new prime minister, one of its most sickly banks has been given a new lease of life with a landmark recapitalization. But, just as the jury is out on whether Thailand’s government can build on its new foundation, it remains to be seen whether TMB Bank can turn the corner after years of underperformance. TMB Bank was created in September 2004 from the merger of Thai Military Bank, DBS Thai Danu Bank and Industrial Finance Corporation. The merger created what was then the fifth-largest bank in Thailand. It now has 471 branches and 5 million deposit accounts but has struggled to generate performance to tally with its scale. It recorded a full-year loss of Bt43.7 billion ($1.39 billion) in 2007, three and a half times worse than the previous year, and has non-performing loans equivalent to 15% of lending as of the start of the year, having set aside Bt31 billion in provisions last year for loan-loss reserve requirements and increasing bad debt.

The US is in danger of dropping out of the top 10 in our semi-annual country risk survey as fears of an economic downturn and an uncertain political future dent analysts’ confidence.

ANZ has made three hires to its London-based markets team. Greg Wakelin has been appointed head of markets, Europe & America. He was previously executive director, structured credit at ANZ Sydney. Christian Hains has joined as an FX spot trader from JP Morgan Chase and Tony Whale joins as senior manager, investor sales. He was previously at Commerzbank.