Search results for

With the oil price high and large new oil finds in the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan has attracted plenty of interest from foreign investors. But tensions have grown up between foreign multinationals and the Kazakhstan government over previously agreed deals. The government feels it has been overly generous in the past, raising fears among foreign investors that old contracts will be redrafted. The president has convened a special council to discuss these issues.

Glenn Grossman doesn't have a lot of good words for banking consolidation. "Each year the party gets better and attendance improves, and each year we raise less money," he says.

Talk to analysts outside Hungary and they express mystification at what they see as the country's apparent lack of support for the development of its stock market. Part of the problem, they say, is that economic growth is being driven so forcefully by inward flows of foreign direct investment (FDI), which in turn has the effect of diverting companies away from the Budapest Stock Exchange (BSE). "Inflows of FDI practically never manifest themselves in new stock market listings," says Frances Cloud, analyst at Nomura in London. "If they take the form of greenfield factories the companies in question don't list on the market, and if it's a question of taking over a local company it usually means the delisting of the stock. We are getting to the point in Hungary where some of the biggest companies are effectively disappearing from the stock market because their free floats are diminishing to practically zero." The problem, says Cloud, is especially pronounced in the chemicals sector.

Much as some might like to, banks can’t uninvent the internet. Nor is there any clear sign that they know what to do with it. For a variety of motives, both obvious and obscure, they have begun entering into platform consortia with rivals. That’s problem enough and costly. Worse, though, is when a platform seems to be biting the hands that feed it.

Investment banks are entering a tricky time as the economy slows and deals dry up. Goldman Sachs' latest earnings showed an increase of just 3% on the same quarter in 1999, a far cry from the double-digit increases of recent years. And for the second quarter in a row Morgan Stanley Dean Witter missed the analysts' earnings consensus. Last time it was by eight cents, half of that coming from a $45 million loss in its high-yield business, a fact which annoyed investors as the firm appeared determined to conceal it. This quarter, it was 23 cents off, which it put down to increased compensation costs, losses in equity investments, and lower underwriting and trading volumes.

CEO, buyingpower

November 24 2000 was a sad day for Liffe traders. Not because they lost vast sums of money, but because that was the day the trading pits finally closed, leaving those soft commodities traders who were the last to depart facing an uncertain future. Few lifestyles offer the same stress, tension and noise as derivatives or commodities trading. In an article that first appeared at www.euromoney.com, Jules Evans discovers the highs and the lows of life in the pit, and finds out how former traders survive in the real world

External and internal pressures are making Lazard chairman Michel David-Weill's position precarious. But he will leave only with the greatest reluctance.

Head of asset-backed finance, Bear Stearns International

Russia’s banks, compared with those in other developing economies, are making a meagre contribution to economic growth. The big corporations, such as Lukoil, have their own banks, and banking institutions in which the state has a stake are beginning to dominate the rest of the sector. Most of the commercial banks are puny, the survivors mostly being those that were too small to wreck themselves in the GKO market crash. That means they have been able to do little by way of lending to smaller businesses.

The secretive partnership of Lazard is not accustomed to public scrutiny, let alone attack from outside. But in early 2000, French entrepreneur Vincent Bolloré announced that he had acquired 31% of one company in the complex Lazard ownership chain. When Swiss bank UBS revealed that it too had acquired shares in other companies in the chain, Lazard chairman Michel David-Weill rushed to fortify the defences against the threat to his family bank's independence,which he cherishes above all else. In November 2000, David-Weill announced that Bolloré had gone away, having achieved what looked like a successful greenmail operation. But he is not the only threat to David-Weill's command. While battling his outside assailants in public, David-Weill has faced a less visible but more serious challenge from rebels inside the Lazard ranks. They have wrung significant concessions out of this last of the banking aristocrats. Now, if an independent Lazard is to thrive, it must stem the tide of departures and rebuild morale within.

The potential for internet growth in Latin American remains among the highest in the world, though that is not sufficient to support large numbers of start-up companies. Financing is hard to come by in both the public and private equity markets. But Latin American internet companies are about to show the rest of the world where the new economy is heading. The convergence of internet, traditional media and telecom businesses is at hand.