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Having pursued a dirigiste approach to local non-financial companies in the 1990s, encouraging expansion abroad and regional leadership, the Singapore government has now turned its attention to the banks, urging liberalization, consolidation and outward-looking expansionism. It can't force the banks to do what it wants. But it gets very cross when they don't.

German insurer Allianz must be happy. It says it has created a new product, developed with UBS Warburg, that will bring joy to investors, to Allianz's portfolio companies and most of all to Allianz itself. It's only a few of UBS Warburg's rival banks that cannot quite share the joy.

The $700 billion trade-finance market is one of the few large pools of tradeable fixed-income assets that has not yet attracted the attention of institutional fixed-income investors. Changing that, and propelling the fragmented and illiquid trade-finance market through the same developments that transformed the emerging-market debt market in the 1980s is the ambition of a group of bankers and traders who last month launched Internet Trade Finance Exchange (ITF).

Deutsche Bank tops our annual poll of polls – by a wide margin – after a consistently impressive run of survey results in 2000, most notably in foreign exchange, where Citigroup was dethroned for the first time in 21 years. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Citigroup head the rankings for a new category, market rating, which brings together overall returns on equity, assets and employees. The market rating and poll of polls have been combined to produce an implied competitiveness rating, in which Deutsche again pips eight American rivals to top position. But a mediocre score for market rating and mergers elsewhere suggest that the German bank might not have it so easy in 2001.

If ever a merger story encapsulated the spirit of a time, French internet service provider Wanadoo's takeover of the UK's Freeserve has to be it. Freeserve, launched in the UK as an ISP in 1998 by the Dixons electrical retail chain, and floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1999, has seen its value collapse in 2000 as the boom in internet stocks turned to bust. But unlike notorious cases such as clothing retailer boo.com, Freeserve has managed to survive the turmoil and looks to have found the ideal parent to take the brand forward.

When the first generation of online firms appeared in the US equity market, they loudly broadcast their ambitions to take on the established players in distribution and new issues. Some made a brief impression, a few managed to get themselves acquired by their larger rivals, many failed. The big firms rolled on. The latest group of internet start-ups have learned a lesson: don’t compete directly with the big equity firms, do something they don’t do.

Nasdaq is still collapsing and there are worries that the US economy could be recession bound as the tech investment boom ends. But I remain optimistic. I reckon the global economy is in for a super-soft landing to sub-3% growth in 2001. Oil prices will stay around $25 a barrel and global inflation will fall, boosting real incomes. Risk appetite will recover. The mini-bear market is almost over.

Vladimir Putin has quickly crushed Russia's infamous oligarchs who once thrived under Boris Yeltsin, though the Family still holds some influence in Moscow. Alongside it, two new factions now share the ascendancy in the Kremlin. Sergei Ivanov leads the hardliners that Putin is using to tighten his grip on political power. German Gref leads the liberal economists charting Russia's economic reform. A clash between them may be coming.

Austria's banks may have had regional expansion thrust upon them, but they have achieved much over the past decade in broadening their franchise, developing retail banking in central and eastern Europe and acting as a bridgehead between transitional economies and the western capital base. Austrian banks reacted very quickly to the opportunities that were opened up in the region as a result of political reform.

Each month since last August, Vladimir Putin’s government has attempted to put in place a new aspect of economic reform. But some problems, notably the banking sector and the entrenched Soviet-style bureaucracy, are particularly intractable.

Emerging market governments were forced to bail out collapsing banking systems at huge public cost following the economic and financial crises of the 1990s and 1980s. Many are now considering setting up deposit insurance systems to bring more transparency and stability to implicit sovereign guarantees for banks. Oddly, in the US, where deposit insurance was first established and whose model emerging markets are often encouraged to follow, deposit insurance is being reconsidered. On its own, it’s no safeguard against banking crises.