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The Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong announced in June that it would be "streamlining and simplifying" the licensing process for hedge fund managers with immediate effect. Alexa Lam, the SFC’s executive director of intermediaries and investment products, said: "These initiatives will make the licensing process easier for fund managers and more particularly for overseas hedge fund managers. They are not intended to lower our regulatory requirements because we recognize that these contribute to Hong Kong’s reputation among investors as being a jurisdiction in which appropriate standards are insisted upon among its market participants."

As the managers of the two Bear Stearns high-grade hedge funds that have attracted such unwelcome publicity over the past month squirm in the spotlight, they must be wondering where they went wrong.

Oil firms Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips have pulled out of Venezuela following president Hugo Chávez’s latest round of nationalizations, in which he proposed huge increases in state participation in projects run by the two US companies and four others.

Big potential seen in mobile communications and financial services.

State Street Global Advisors, the investment management arm of State Street Corporation, has announced it now has $100 billion in assets under management for its currency strategies. The company says its currency AUM have more than doubled over the last three years, which it says reflects the increasing importance of FX strategies to pension fund managers.

As some banks – and a tiny few aspirant young bankers – have realized, there’s good business to be built in the out-of-fashion traditional investment-grade debt capital markets.

Although most analysts failed to predict it, the decision by the National Bank of Poland’s monetary policy committee to increase its benchmark seven-day intervention rate on June 27 by a quarter point to 4.50% had only a marginal impact in the market. The zloty strengthened, as might have been expected, but there was only an extremely modest sell-off in the bond markets, particularly at the long end. Most activity took place at the short end of the yield curve.

Iceland’s Straumur-Burdarás investment bank has extended its international reach to central and eastern Europe with the acquisition of a 50% stake in Wood & Company, the Prague investment banking boutique house, for an undisclosed sum. Reykjavik-headquartered Straumur has an option to increase its holding to 100% no later than early 2011.

New service aims to introduce competitive auction for programme trades.

A new generation of CDOs assumes spreads will probably widen.

CME posts good numbers

Great-West Lifeco (GWL) has priced the first Canadian dollar-denominated, tax-deductible hybrid capital transaction.