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After every great party comes a reckoning. Because they overindulged sub-prime borrowers with unprecedented excess credit, US financial markets are facing a long and severe hangover. The American dream of homeownership for all has turned sour, while cleaning up the mess will be painful. Amid the finger-pointing, dislocation and illiquidity, though, fortunes will be made. Alex Chambers reports.

"Servicing is facing all sorts of challenges that previously it really did not have to deal with before"

The industrial town of Taiyuan doesn’t look much of a place for landmarks. True, the capital of Shanxi province is often compared in environmental literature to Los Angeles, but only because it is surrounded on three sides by mountains to create a similar trap for smog. But this coal-mining city, largely unknown to the west despite having as many inhabitants as Rome, has a claim to fame: it is the birthplace of emissions trading in China.

Central bank governor of the year – Finance minister of the year – Lifetime contribution award

Financial supply chain debate: Linking the supply chain

Indonesian companies have chosen to fund their businesses in esoteric ways, and that may be at the expense of developing a mature equity market. Old habits will prove tough to change. Chris Leahy reports.

Africa is the last frontier. There is nowhere attracting more pioneers than Nigeria. With its large and innovative workforce, its attractions are obvious. But is it safe as an investment? Rupert Wright reports from Lagos.

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%), forfaiting (5%). • Political risk: the risk of non-payment or non-servicing of payment for goods or services, loans, trade-related finance and dividends, and the non-repatriation of capital. Risk analysts give each country a score between 10 and zero: the higher, the better.

Hedge funds are in the news for all the wrong reasons. But strident calls for regulation are more than just wrong, they are downright dangerous. Financial markets need hedge funds more than ever.

BBVA: What can be bad when so much is good?

In the clearest sign yet that Turkmenistan is opening to foreign direct investment, the country has granted the first gas production licence to an overseas company. China’s national oil company, CNPC, has received approval to develop a field in the Amu Darya region in eastern Turkmenistan – the first new gas deposit to be developed since Soviet times. The project includes pipelines that will carry gas east across the region to China. CNPC eventually expects to produce 17 billion cubic metres of gas a year from the field.

As recent bridge collapses in the US and China illustrated, the difference between good and bad infrastructure is a matter of life and death. Nowhere is that more true than in Russia, where Soviet-era infrastructure is now creaking under the strain of coping with the increasing demands of the country’s booming market economy.