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Asia's leaders are playing a dangerous game of poker with the US, accumulating dollar reserves even as the US currency falls. Excess liquidity is driving stock markets in Asia and threatens to inflate bubbles while economic restructuring is patchy. The game cannot continue indefinitely: the end could be ugly. Chris Leahy reports.

The Dutch B2B group pulls off a large restructuring to survive a liquidity crunch amid heavy trading of its debt by US hedge funds.

It is just past midnight at The Morning Night Bar a few doors down from Bangkok's notorious Nana Entertainment Plaza and the party is in full swing. Loud rock music belts from speakers, clouds of cigarette smoke hug the pool tables and groups of inebriated western men clutch younger-looking Thai consorts as the Singha beer flows and the good times roll.

Selling off Germany's autobahns and lamp posts are two of the more bizarre proposals of a government desperate to raise cash to bail out an ailing economy. The irony is that while there is broad agreement that changes are needed, the country's consensus system of politics is impeding progress. Ben Aris reports.

Amid the roll-out of China's vast privatization programme international attention is focused on the transfers of big state-owned enterprises. But the ownership of thousands of other smaller operations is being changed via hundreds of small, local asset exchanges. Regulation of these is being beefed up. Chris Leahy reports.

President Vladimir Putin surprised everyone with his appointment of unknown technocrat Mikhail Fradkov to replace sacked prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov. Fradkov is Russia's envoy to the EU, based in Brussels. Before this, he was director of the tax police. In many ways, he is a compromise candidate between the two Kremlin factions of the security services and the liberal reformers. He has served in the Russian security council, giving him links to the former, and also served in Yegor Gaidar's reformist government in the early 1990s, giving him some credibility with the latter group. He is not well-known but regarded as a competent bureaucrat who will, above all, be loyal to Putin.

On February 25, the Bahrain Monetary Agency went on the road to sell a $250 million sukuk – Bahrain's first international Islamic bond. Bahrain's bond follows issues by Qatar and Malaysia. And the news that Citigroup is working with the German state of Saxony-Anhalt on an Islamic bond suggests that, as well as being used to boost the Islamic capital markets, sukuks can be commercially attractive to a broad audience.

Standing in his office in Raffeisen's headquarters in Vienna, RZB International's chairman Herbert Stepic points with pride to a large world map dotted with small RZB flags showing the bank's outlets around the globe, including branches in China, Singapore and New York, and recently-opened subsidiaries in Albania and Belarus. His office is more like that of a Cecil Rhodes-type imperial pioneer than a banker, filled as it is with African sculptures and Chinese tapestries.

ANZ Investment Bank today announces the appointment of Malcolm Hiscock as global head of corporate finance. Malcolm is an M&A specialist with a strong track record of over 14 years' experience in high profile transactions for major listed companies both in Australia and internationally.

India's bond and equity markets spurted into action last month as the government announced over $3 billion-worth of sales of shares in six companies. Indian companies and banks will also tap the market for another $2 billion, about half of which will be foreign currency debt. In addition, the Asian Development Bank closed a $110 million rupee bond, the first local currency bond by a multilateral bank.

Through his creation, 21i.net, entrepreneur Fritz Kaiser is hoping to bring together the leading wealth management service providers in the world as a type of one-stop shop. His path towards a wealth management utopia, however, is not as smooth as had been foreseen. Helen Avery reports.

RediPlus didn't get much of a mention at the time of the acquisition of Spear Leeds Kellogg by Goldman Sachs. Most of the focus was either on the price, initially $6.5 billion, or on what seemed to be an about-face by the investment bank. SLK was best known as a specialist, the market maker on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Goldman had been a prolific investors in its nemesis, the electronic trading platforms, and seemed to regard the specialist model as unsustainable.