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The economy minister’s ousting signals the end of an era.

Search the results Ahli United Bank has begun to open up the Middle East private banking business on a regional level, outperforming global rivals in the process

The National Bank of Abu Dhabi’s (NBAD) $850m floating rate note sold in December has set a new benchmark for the region’s issuers both in terms of size and spread.

Asia’s business community is never slow to spot a trend and real estate investment trusts are certainly hot news. A trickle from the pipeline of early Reit offerings in Singapore and latterly Hong Kong earlier in 2005 threatens to become a torrent of new issues in 2006 as the region’s property developers and investment banks line up to launch new vehicles for Asia’s yield-voracious investors.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported record FX volume on December 12. A total of 872,271 futures and option contracts were traded, representing $96 billion in notional value. This was 16.6% up on the previous record of 748,050 contracts, set on June 8 2005. Electronic transactions on the exchange’s Globex platform accounted for 71% of the turnover. Even though calendar rolls into the March contract inflated the total, if the CME can maintain levels at anywhere near the record, the debate on whether or not FX can migrate to an exchange-traded environment will grow louder.

“What surprised me when I became minister of finance was that we had the debt situation, but nobody wanted to talk about it. We need to first explain how we got into this position before we can talk about how we will get out of it.”

Fitch has cut Hungary’s sovereign credit rating to BBB+ from A–, one of the first times that a new EU member state has had a downward, rather than upward, rating movement applied to it since the EU enlargement process began.

China Aviation Oil (Singapore) Corporation (CAO) the Singapore-listed subsidiary of mainland Chinese aviation fuel importer China Aviation Oil Holding Company (CAOH) announced in December a successful debt restructuring including significant investments from BP Investments Asia and Temasek Holdings.

“OK, if there were a big credit event, and if it coincided with one of the dealers going down, there would be a problem. How many ‘ifs’ do they want?”

In an historic move in late November, the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, conducted the first ever swap of renminbi with the US dollar, a move that it intends to repeat fortnightly.

With just weeks to go before the SEC’s new hedge fund regulation comes into force, its legitimacy has been questioned by a federal appeals court. Philip Goldstein has been challenging the rule in court, arguing that the regulator does not have the power to alter or make law [see Euromoney March 2005]. Although it was widely supposed that Goldstein’s complaints would go unnoticed, judges in the case last month questioned whether the SEC had overstepped its authority. A decision is expected in two months.