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Former assistant secretary of US Treasury for international affairs

Smith&Wollensky has come up with the ideal recipe for those bankers and investors who are still smarting, and who are feeling slightly less flush in the wallet department. Despite sounding like a boutique financial firm, Smith&Wollensky is in fact one of New York's premier steakhouses, oft frequented for lunch and dinner by all echelons of Wall Street.

In foreign exchange it's a truism that size matters. Niche players are being squeezed out of the market because they can't compete with the big banks on price, and even the heavyweights are swallowing each other up in a bid to become the most powerful institution. For now, there's one clear leader.

New bankruptcy legislation making its way through the US Congress may have unintended consequences that could cause it to backfire on the banking industry.

While Horlick’s problems were perhaps the most widely documented of the SocGen team, Keith Percy and John Richards also had their own difficulties.

The Federal Reserve caught the markets off their guard when it slashed the Federal Funds rate by half a percentage point on April 18.

Faced with rising technology costs and regulatory change, fund managers are seeking to transfer more processes to their global custodians. In doing so, they are presenting service providers with a new set of challenges and opportunities. Rick Butler asks how far the trend to outsourcing can go

More and more Arab banks accept that they must embrace the internet or risk losing share in their home markets to more technology-savvy international players. National banks see the internet as a means to realize their regional ambitions. Change is under way across the region, perhaps most notably in Bahrain, traditionally the key offshore banking centre in the Gulf. Now Islamic banking and investment banking operations are growing up and offshore banking is becoming less prominent. The country’s leading offshore and local banks are rethinking their strategies and hope to become regional players.

When Glas Cymru won approval from Ofwat to restructure Welsh Water, it introduced a new model for privatized UK utilities that does away with conventional shareholders. Glas will break new ground by financing its purchase entirely through a securitization. But despite the problems caused by shareholders taking cash out of the industry that the regulator wants to go to customers, many water companies argue that equity still has a role to play in their funding structure. Steve Metcalfe reports on a debate that could force the restructuring of an entire sector and might yield lessons for other utilities

India has built an innovative, fast-growing export industry in IT services, software and equipment thanks to a highly skilled, low-cost workforce. However, the US slowdown has hit share prices of Indian IT companies hard and executives fear it could damage their revenues. Others are more sanguine, pointing out that a newly chastened, cost-conscious IT industry in the US will find India’s value-for-money outsourcing proposition even more attractive.

On a trip to Baroda, a dusty, remote town in western India, a senior executive from a multinational in Mumbai was astonished to find a small IT company that processes parking tickets for the New York Police Department.