Search results for

In little more than a decade, Islamic banking has grown into a $200 billion a year industry. With top global banks entering the market, it is deepening its professionalism and broadening out with sophisticated and ingenious new products, including private equity, mortgages and even some securitization. Regulators are striving to impose stricter regimes. But individual Sharia courts can still be at odds over what is deemed compliant with Islamic law.

LATIN AMERICA

INDONESIA

The economies of Latin America have for differing reasons been severely affected by global economic slowdown. Argentina has to face mounting debt tangles as well as crippling deflation and Brazil faces similar problems. Mexico’s success story looks as if it will pick up again but for the moment has been interrupted by the US slowdown. Remarkably, though, the region’s equity markets have so far ridden out the crisis.

FUND MANAGEMENT

SECURITIES EXCHANGES

Merrill Lynch HSBC, the online share dealing and research platform for high-net-worth individuals, has fallen on hard times, with disappointing trading volumes. The banks involved will no doubt live to fight another day, but spare a thought for the 150 employees that the venture has made redundant. Not only have they lost their jobs, an attempt to give them career advice has added insult to injury.

It’s not all bad. The world of international finance works in mysterious ways, and right now it looks as though central America is actually a beneficiary of Argentina’s default and the US recession.

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?