Search results for

FUND MANAGEMENT

SECURITIES EXCHANGES

November 4 was not an especially clever day to be taking a Sunday morning stroll along the quayside in George Town. Hurricane Michelle may have been 100 or so miles away but that was close enough for her to give the capital of the Cayman Islands an almighty battering, the like of which had not been seen since the 1930s.

Three years after European monetary union, euro notes and coins enter circulation next month. Some observers predict a mild boost for the currency. But will fresh impetus also be lent to Brussels’ initiative to build a single European market in financial services to complete the picture? This project has been caught up in a constitutional trial of strength as the Strasbourg-based parliament asserts itself. Alexandre Lamfalussy, an architect of the project, hopes the euro’s arrival will focus attention on resolving the dispute about who should agree the principles and who the detail.

INDIA

WestLB’s principal finance team has set itself the task of landing a trophy deal. So far it has had the full support of the state-owned German bank’s chairman and credit committee. Yet the profitability of the business remains unclear and some suspect its head, Robin Saunders, is concentrating on making a name for herself.

Every indicator we look at shows that the world is in recession. That's the reality. It's always easier to drown if everyone else in the pool is drowning too. So who will be the lifeguard?

The stunning collapse of the once high-flying US energy group Enron is hardly a laughing matter. And hindsight, as we all know, can be a wonderful thing. But it is still hard to resist a cynical chuckle at the promotional blurb used on the website for Enron Credit - the company's credit trading unit.

It's not the easiest of times for Mexican president Vicente Fox, whose country is suffering from the double whammy of a falling oil price and the knock-on effects of the US recession. But even if the stresses of his job are keeping him awake at night, they haven't done anything to dull his good looks.

Ingeniously structured from a legal point of view, Argentina's debt restructuring begins with what is effectively a domestic bond swap. If you are a bondholder, though, the pricing doesn't look as clever as the structure. And looming on the horizon is the threat of exit consents and the worry that Argentina will not countenance an abandonment of the fixed peso-dollar exchange rate.

News of the merger between National Bank of Greece and Alpha Bank boosted the Greek stock market. But the fact that NBG will remain part state-owned underlines the centre-left government’s lukewarm commitment to privatization. So despite an upgrade from emerging-market status and full entry into euroland, Greece still hasn’t quickened the pulse of investors.

Telecoms companies mired in debt are a salutary example of what can happen when steady unexciting service providers try to take on more dynamic roles. European utilities would be hard-pressed to spend anything like as much on expansion as telecoms did on G3 mobile licences, yet some of their plans are sending jitters through the markets.