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Kazakhstan's banking system is a success story whose rapid growth brings a need for capital injections, hence growing foreign interest. But while the banks are operationally transparent, ownership is opaque. What's more, a small population might limit foreign participation beyond investment banking.

A study of CEO pay and skill by professors Robert Daines, Vinay Nair and Lewis Kornhauser, of Stanford University, the Wharton School and New York University, respectively, has found little evidence of high skill among CEOs at big firms. Moreover the research also found evidence that pay and skill are negatively related in the performance of big firms in industries constrained by business environment factors.

Thousands of US stocks are being traded on a little-known Berlin exchange, without the knowledge of many of the companies involved. Have the naked short sellers exported their practice overseas?

What do the European Union's new rules on curbing pollution mean for utilities? The plans to cut carbon emissions over the next seven years to sub-1990 levels will hit the biggest polluters hardest. Utilities account for about a third of European carbon emissions.

Hungary's economy is growing well, with relatively low unemployment and high foreign direct investment. But the government budget deficit is running far above EU criteria and there are divided counsels on how to control it.

With the Russian state rolling back the liberalization of the economy – notably in its dealings with oil company Yukos – investment banks are faced with a dilemma. They must sometimes decide between defending the rights of private investors and forging and maintaining relations with the Kremlin in the hope of attracting current and future business. It's a tough choice.

Bear Stearns's young UK subprime lender has entered the RMBS market using an innovative offering circular that should position it well for future deals.

Shareholders and executives in some of the US's smallest listed companies believe their share prices have been forced down by illegal naked shorting. This has led to a number of lawsuits, claiming unscrupulous behaviour by brokers and market-makers exploiting loopholes in the central clearing system. Those implicated dismiss the allegations as rubbish. What's going on?

Before 1992, David Gershon didn't know the difference between bonds and equities, so to have set up a company that revolutionized the pricing of currency options less than a decade later is no mean feat. Gershon left school with the dream of becoming a professor of physics and spent most of his twenties gaining a number of impressive academic accolades. His PhD was in superstring theory. "This theory was first developed in 1981. It gained popularity throughout the 1980s as the first theory that could unify all the forces in nature, which is why it is sometimes called the theory of everything," he says. "It's a beautiful idea but unfortunately to me it looked like it was reaching a dead end with its ambitious role to 'replace the need in God'. It had too many unknowns and ambiguities." While writing his thesis, Gershon completed an MBA and began increasingly to think about finance. Eventually, he decided to switch disciplines and joined the graduate programme of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Very quickly he started to get offers to do consultancy work, one of which took him to the mortgages department of NationsBank. Soon after, he received job offers from Wall Street firms and he moved to New York in 1994. "At the time there was a fair amount of demand for people with experience in mathematics and physics," he says. Gershon then traded FX at Deutsche Bank and Barclays Capital, covering emerging markets. He later transferred to Barclays' head office in London, where he was global head of FX options. In 2000, he left Barclays and set up SuperDerivatives. "SuperDerivatives' initial mission, which remains its aim today, was to help thousands of people already and potentially involved in options to obtain real market prices rather than just theoretical values," he says.