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There are no holds barred in the competition between exchanges. As people arrived to hear a Hans Tietmeyer lecture in the City of London organized by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, they were greeted outside the venue by young ladies handing out leaflets spouting the benefits of trading FX with Eurex US. It all seemed harmless enough.

Erste Bank launches The New Europe Blue Chip Index, covering the largest C&E European stocks traded on the Vienna stock exchange.

Agency’s rating action places extra focus on bank’s securitization of first-loss positions.

At long last the first big refinancing of German multifamily residential units is starting to happen. The €1.55 billion Immeo Residential Finance is in effect a new asset class – multi-family residential. The underlying asset is a portfolio of 48,000 units in the Rhine-Ruhr region formerly owned by Thyssen Krupp purchased by Morgan Stanley Real Estate Fund (MSREF) and Corpus. This will be the benchmark for other German multi-family real estate refinancings that will take place in the coming months.

The first of China’s four largest state-owned banks, China Construction Bank, hit the road in October for its well-trailed IPO. Despite a $8 billion offering, the largest IPO globally this year, CCB eschewed a New York listing, spooked by the Sarbanes-Oxley straitjacket, opting for Hong Kong alone.

Reports that Spanish company Telefónica was in talks to acquire Dutch telecom rival KPN for around $24 billion sent shares in KPN soaring and prompted talk of another round of consolidation in the European telecoms market. KPN denied being in talks with Telefónica.

In another sign of Vietnam’s economic reforms, the finance ministry confirmed in local media that the government had approved the country’s maiden sovereign bond issue. Up to $500 million-worth of dollar-denominated bonds are likely to be issued this year. Moody’s upgraded the sovereign to Ba3 in July.

After a few tough years, the country is on investors’ radar screens again.

Saudi and Qatari banks launch new investment products. National Commercial Bank has become only the second Saudi Arabian financial services provider to launch a Shariah-compliant mutual fund that will invest in the countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Hybrid corporate bonds might be the new hot product of the Eurobond market but originators’ hopes for a deluge of new issues have not been fulfilled.

CDP’s latest issue shows the benefits of looking beyond the usual suspects to banks that offer strong secondary market support and enhanced distribution.

As the world awakes to the possibility of a bird-flu pandemic, analysts at CLSA have assessed the economic implications for Asia of an outbreak. CLSA has compiled an index of relative economic risk based on healthcare expenditures per capita, tourist arrivals per capita and total trade as a proportion of GDP. The results might surprise most readers. Based on these three measures, Hong Kong and Singapore emerge as the economies most at risk, followed by China, Malaysia and Thailand. Despite high spending on healthcare, both Hong Kong and Singapore remain highly exposed to the economic fallout from a pandemic by dint of their high dependence on international trade. Each country also has tourist arrivals roughly twice its population.