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Issuer: Commerzbank

Chairman and founder, Garner International

The culture of corporate bonding has taken hold in the UK. Off-sites, golf tournaments, tank-driving weekends, group hugs - they're all about learning to love your co-workers, and in doing so make your office a more harmonious, and profitable, place.

Foreign investors with their eyes fixed on Russia's continued powerful economic growth are shrugging off the recent arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The CEO of oil giant Yukos and Russia's richest man, he was pulled in on October 25 by Kalashnikov-toting officers of the FSB (federal securities services). This might have briefly unsettled the stock market, but foreign companies selling soap and coffee to increasingly affluent Russian consumers believe their businesses will be unaffected.

In the name of transparency, liquidity and, paradoxically, fair pricing for investors, the current draft of the EU's revised Investment Services Directive threatens to undermine investment banks' internalized securities trading. Ian Mackenzie reports.

From banking to bongos. Until 2001, Jay MacDonald was a nickel trader, most recently for Standard Bank in London. But 18 months ago he ditched his day job and six-figure salary to become a professional bongo drum player.

George Soros, billionaire speculator and philanthropist, was in a bad mood when he addressed the US Russian Investment Conference in Boston last month. On November 6, "40 hooded goons" raided the Moscow office of his Open Russia philanthropic venture, and took away boxes of files.

Long-term themes, such as the US current account deficit and output gap, have caught the forex market's attention and will be crucial to the dollar exchange rate. Lara Rhame reports

Has Silicon Valley finally got its groove back? Venture capital investment in start-up companies rose to $35 million in the third quarter, up 36% on the previous three months. M&A activity is also rising. And talk of a $20 billion initial public offering by Google is generating the kind of buzz last experienced in 1999.

Activity might be picking up in M&A departments but that hasn't stemmed the flow of experienced bankers willing to make the leap into corporate in-house teams. Partly it's a case of unemployed corporate financiers taking any job on offer. Recruiters say that the candidate pool in M&A is still much bigger than the number of jobs available, and there are now more positions going at corporates. "The money's nothing like what you get in the good times at a bank, but we have got corporate assignments on our books at the moment, but not banking ones, which speaks for itself," says David Timson, senior partner of recruitment firm The Curzon Partnership.

BCP's small size gives it an advantage when trading the sort of Latin companies it targets - those that operate beneath the big boys' radar - Felix Salmon reports.