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There's an obvious appeal in linking your brand with the Olympic ethos of excellence and achievement, as the likes of John Hancock, Visa and Greece's own Alpha Bank did at last month's Athens Games. Other sponsorships are harder to work out. Standard Bank of South Africa, for example, is sponsoring a dead whale. Misty is, or was, a southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) that came off second best in a collision with a ship and washed up near Cape Town. As Standard Bank says in a grisly press release: ?Decomposition set in and her rotting 70-ton body became a source of controversy. It was decided to implode the carcass but [residents] persuaded the powers to allow them to remove the rotting flesh to preserve the skeleton.

In 20 months as governor, Alfonso Prat-Gay built a credible central bank from almost nothing, managed the money supply brilliantly, oversaw currency stability, kept rates low and even began whipping the banking sector into shape. For these achievements, he is Euromoney's central bank governor of the year. But he also strove for greater independence for the central bank. Now, on the eve of the country's crucial bond exchange, president Nestor Kirchner has chosen to dispense with Argentina's most internationally respected policymaker.

General Motors Asset Management (GMAM), which has about $148 billion in assets under management, invests in structured credit. Its Promark Alternative High Yield fund has primarily bought CDO equity tranches.

Senior bankers who quit their jobs on the pretext of pursuing new interests often quickly emerge in a similar role. Not so Manfred Schepers, who left UBS last June after 17 years. He said he was leaving to consider new banking roles but that his first priority was a good break. He meant it.

South Africa has built stable macroeconomic foundations since the overthrow of apartheid but its potential as a regional leader is still hampered by corporate rigidities, untapped talent reflected in high unemployment, an Aids epidemic and a failure to attract inward investment.

MBNA Europe's delinked programme should help Europe's ABS issuers to respond to investor demand

German savings banks are using credit default swaps to reduce their credit risk concentration for the first time.

When Dutch telecoms company KPN did a e2.1 billion combined simultaneous tender and exchange in July, joint lead managed by Deutsche Bank and Bank of America, it was one of Europe's most complex liability management deals.

Credit hedge funds and proprietary trading desks are starting to encroach on the trades once reserved for the distressed, equity long/short and merger arbitrage funds. US airline companies have been in trouble for several years now, most recently because of the overwhelming costs of their defined-benefit pension plans. This year, for the first time, credit-specialist hedge funds have been taking a variety of trading positions as a result. Even before the pension problems, credit hedge funds were taking various positions on airlines this year, such as putting on long/short trades on an airline's secured and unsecured paper.

No-one disputes that China's growth rate needed reining in. While investors worry over the possible consequences of a sharp slowdown, most economists believe that, contrary to global historical precedent, the Chinese authorities might have pulled off the trick of a relatively painless cool-down. But serious structural flaws in the economy remain and make China a perilous place to invest.

Full results | Activist investors set governance agenda