Search results for

In the back parlours of the financial markets, where credit derivatives meet securitization, bankers are slicing and dicing credit to create a grand smorgasbord of investment products. The names of these delicacies are confusing, the recipes are closely guarded secrets and each firm has its own unique house style. But for firms and bankers with the requisite know-how, there is plenty of money to be made. The top credit structurers – bankers with a background in quant, an understanding of credit and a flair for complex legal contracts – can name their price.

When Julian Simmonds, global head of foreign exchange and structured products businesses at Citigroup, announced his decision to retire this May, it sent shockwaves through the bank. Senior executives are thought to be trying to talk Simmonds, who joined Citibank in 1972 and achieved prominence by building its forex business into the undisputed market leader in the 1980s and 1990s, into hanging round a little longer. "No one event has prompted my decision," Simmonds tells Euromoney. "But 29 years is a long, long time in a high pressure position. I have outside interests, as has my wife and I'd like to participate in those with her."

With banks increasingly consolidating or at least cross-linking their debt-arranger activities, Euromoney has concluded that its annual bond, loan and MTN rankings should appear as a single table. In this introduction to the results, Jennifer Morris looks at the ways in which boundaries between different areas of debt are becoming blurred and assesses the challenge to investment banks’ core business from commercial banks

Peter Hancock has made quite a name for himself as a talented banker, skillful innovator and determined risk-taker. So when he addressed Isda's AGM in Washington last month, he was guaranteed a good turnout. But, as the audience quickly realized, Hancock has a talent for saying a lot while giving little away.

The most famous face in fund management in the City talks about the fruitless efforts by tabloid newspapers to dig up details of her private life in the wake of her departure from Morgan Grenfell four years ago.

If Silvio Berlusconi and Italy's new centre-right coalition take power they will depend heavily on Milanese tax lawyer and academic Giulio Tremonti to win and maintain the trust of the financial markets.

Marc Viénot talks about his paris Europlace and life after Société Générale.

KMV designed its expected default rate charts as a way to make first banks, and now investors, better able to monitor credit risk and trade bonds. Now its data might be the harbinger of doom for the US, which has spent most of the year hoping that a series of interest rate cuts will be enough to salve its ills and stave off recession.

South Africa is a contradictory country. Its economy is the size of Poland's or Thailand's. It has income disparities similar to Brazil's. In population and wage rates, it's Argentina. But it spends three times more of GDP on public education than China and twice as much as the average of all emerging markets.

After a nightmare decade of war, sanctions, mismanagement and institutionalized criminality, Serbs are hoping for a speedy deliverance from a mounting economic crisis. Yet despite promises of aid to the post-Milosevic Serbian and federal Yugoslav governments, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. Erik D’Amato reports from the frontlines of the most critical European economic transition since 1991