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Awards for Excellence 2002

Awards for Excellence 2002

AFRICA

Awards for Excellence 2002

Managing director, Ernst & Young

CENTRAL ASIA

NORTH AMERICA

There have been many means mooted for helping to raise money in the memory of those killed in the September terrorist attacks in New York but Barclays Capital has come up with one of the more apt, as well as more entertaining. At the end of last month, on Saturday, June 29 to be exact, the UK and US Barclays Capital football teams met up with the Fire Department of New York and New York Police Department football teams (they call themselves soccer teams, of course) for a four-way tournament played in New York's East River Park.

Investment banks have a genius for gobbledegook. Whether dressing up their activities in meaningless jargon to bamboozle their clients, or giving preposterous job titles to their people to make them feel more important, they are masters of the craft. It is a long time since the appearance of silly-sounding titles such as "global head" first raised a titter. And we have all become jaded by the serial abuse of language carried out by investment banks over the years.

The euro continues its recovery against the US dollar. Everything seems rosy in the EU garden. Dissatisfaction among citizens has not become a concerted anti-European platform. The extreme right in France has failed in elections and it is inconceivable that German dissatisfaction with the euro will spill over into actual opposition to it. The British government is growing increasingly confident about its ability to take the UK into monetary union. Above all, enlargement seems to be on target.

For such an original thinker, Joseph Stiglitz's latest book, Globalization and its Discontents, has a desperately unoriginal title. But you mustn't let the fact that amazon.com offers three other works with that title put you off reading this one. For Stiglitz has produced the first genuinely authoritative and compelling argument that globalization, at least as practised by the IMF and the World Trade Organization, is actually a bad thing for precisely those developing countries the multilateral organizations are meant to be trying to help.

Investors looking for silver linings to cloudy markets might care to take note of a new report that backs up the theory that you should "sell in May and go away". Taking a long summer holiday is the best way to avoid the worst downsides of a bear market, says Heydon Traub, managing director of global asset allocation at State Street Global Advisors.