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Given CMC Markets’ success story, it was hardly surprising that the company’s planned initial public offering in the summer of 2006 attracted so much press attention, especially in the UK.

Numerical proof of how tough the foreign exchange market was for many participants through the summer of 2006 has been provided by semi-annual volume data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Foreign Exchange Committee and the Bank of England’s FX Joint Standing Committee. According to the FXC, average daily volume in over-the-counter FX instruments in October 2006 totalled $534 billion, 7.5% down on April 2006.

Liability management can be a double-edged sword. Get it right and everyone showers you with plaudits about your relative sophistication as a borrower and how attentive you are to addressing investors’ wants and needs. Get it wrong, however, and your name is quickly mud and the world and his fund manager wife are soon griping about how naive you are and how difficult it will be for you to achieve your funding target for the year if you carry on in a such a cavalier, market-unfriendly manner.

Proponents of the merger between the New York Stock Exchange and Euronext believe it will enhance Paris’s position as a financial centre as the $14 billion deal promises to maintain independence. One cheerleader has been Daniel Bouton, chairman and CEO of Société Générale. At the Euromoney Paris Forum, held at the close of 2006, he was interviewed by Mark Johnson, Euromoney’s editor of conferences.

Standard & Poor’s has downgraded Ecuador’s long-term foreign currency ratings to CCC from CCC+. S&P also changed the credit rating outlook to stable from positive. The moves follow repeated statements by Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, that the government would fail to make an interest payment on its debt due this month. Last month economy minister Ricardo Patino told investors that the government was considering repaying only 40% of its foreign debt. He added that he expected a debt-restructuring plan to emerge soon. Correa’s government, which came into power in January, believes much of Ecuador’s $11 billion-worth of foreign debt is illegitimate because it was borrowed by military dictatorships that ran the country in the past.

Russell Investment Group has launched a range of global indices that apply the same criteria to all companies regardless of size and the country in which they are listed.

Benchmark multi-family CMBS deal refinanced after just over a year.

The growing number of investors wanting to short the commercial property market is good news for property derivatives.

FX debate: Participants

Regulatory arbitrage will to take a new form once bankers can get their heads around Basle II.

Albania has something of an image problem abroad. What scant coverage the country has received in the international press in the past has almost universally been negative in tone, focusing on drugs-trafficking, Mafia shootings, banking scandals and political mismanagement. It’s hardly the ideal news recipe if you’re looking to attract much-needed investment to a country often dubbed the poor man of Europe.

Babson-managed CDPC takes industry to the mainstream of structured credit.