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Asian Development Bank presidents have always been Japanese, appointed unchallenged by Japan’s finance ministry. Recently they have hardly shone as leaders. Tadao Chino seems to have broken with that pattern, quietly building consensus within the bank and focusing on direct poverty alleviation rather than grand infrastructure projects.

Following Argentina's default the Washington Consensus seems completely devalued as there seems to be precious little correlation between the degree to which a country embraces reform and the likelihood of its economic success.

Hungarian oil and gas company Mol has set its sights on regional expansion and rationalization, with its current programme including bids for Polish companies and an offloading of its domestic gas interests. Both deals have, however, been disrupted by political factors.

Investors were asked to rate named analysts and teams for the categories indicated. The credit research houses themselves nominated teams. Scores were given in the ratio 5:4:3:2 for first, second, third, fourth and fifth place nominations respectively.

Indonesia

Investment banking

Corporate Governance

Merrill Lynch has merged its high-grade and high-yield research teams. So has JP Morgan. They say it provides quality coverage, especially for fallen angels. But is it really just cost cutting in a bear market?

When Banque Nationale de Paris bought Paribas in 1999, sceptics said the combination would never work. Labelled a merger of equals, it was clearly a takeover by BNP of its smaller rival. In the aftermath of the deal, the bank lost large numbers of staff as doubters tired of the chaos and jumped ship. Two years and a creditable set of annual results on, it seems that they were wrong. But there's a huge hole in CEO Michel Pébereau's plan - investment banking. Time is running out for him to do something about it.

Two years ago the asset management division of UBS was facing an uncertain future. With figureheads Gary Brinson and Tony Dye gone it was time for new faces to take the lead. As value investing has come back into favour, performance has turned around and now UBS has done the logical thing, uniting the operation under one banner. Where next for UBS Global Asset Management?

ASIA