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Benjamin Jacquard has been appointed global head of structured credit markets at Calyon, replacing Loïc Fery, formerly head of credit markets, who left the bank in September. Fery was forced out, along with several other senior officials in Calyon’s credit markets business, after a $250 million loss in credit indices trading. With a new leader, the French bank will hope that its newly named structured credit markets business will fare better. Jacquard ran the correlation book and was head of credit structuring at Bank of America before joining Calyon as global head of credit market trading six months ago.

Spotted in India: Goldman Sachs’s chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, enjoying the festivities at a party in New Delhi hosted by Azim Premji, the silver-haired chief of one of the subcontinent’s biggest IT firms, Wipro.

The once-unthinkable news that super-senior CDO risk could be vulnerable to downgrade has been very bad news for the monoline guarantors as well as the banks. Most vulnerable to write-downs as a result of wrapping these tranches is Ambac, with $29.2 billion exposure to US ABS CDOs. MBIA has $19.3 billion and XLCA $16.1 billion. However, Moody’s reckons that the likelihood of any of these firms facing a capital shortfall is unlikely (MBIA) or moderate (Ambac and XLCA). The rating agencies deem Natixis-owned CIFG to be at the greatest risk of facing a capital shortfall. The firm has a $4 billion exposure to the CDO market. Of the big four firms, FSA is the most comfortably positioned, with a mere $364 million exposure to US ABS CDOs.

Japan’s Nomura booked a ¥73 billion ($621 million) loss from its residential mortgage-backed securities unit as the company announced its exit from the US RMBS market. The bank described the move as part of a general reduction in its US activities that will cut the number of employees by 400 to 900. Although the loss is small in comparison with the billion-dollar losses at some American banks, it is the largest yet reported by a major Japanese institution as a result of the sub-prime problem. In a statement, Nomura president and CEO Nobuyuki Koga acknowledged "disappointing results" in the US RMBS market but said that the bank had "moved decisively to deal with the issue and had avoided further and protracted losses by taking firm and immediate action".

A study by Integrity Research Associates shows a disparity between research conducted by traditional buy-side firms and their hedge fund counterparts that could explain the latter’s outperformance.

HSBC’s global headquarters in Canary Wharf hosted an entirely different type of journalist last month at the press conference announcing the British bank’s sponsorship of the British and Irish Lions for their 2009 tour of South Africa.

The proliferation of sovereign wealth funds is an opportunity and challenge for investment banks and asset managers.

Credit card ABS has so far escaped contamination by sub-prime. Some might worry that volumes are up, but key metrics are strong. If this market does well, it could be a template for others. Alex Chambers reports.

With little to choose between the capabilities of covered bond departments, issuers are granting mandates for different reasons.

There is a rumour that Temasek would like to combine Standard Chartered with DBS in order to create a true, global, Singapore-headquartered powerhouse. It’s a great theory. But does it stand up?

The sixth annual report on global investment management by KPMG has revealed that further convergence between hedge funds, private equity companies and long-only managers is to be expected.

Markit purchase of IIC could herald creation of a global credit derivatives index.