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Listening to Grigory Marchenko talk you could be forgiven for thinking he was central bank governor of a booming first world economy. The budget is balanced - in fact there is a surplus; financial infrastructure is robust and the banking system in good shape. Marchenko himself is urbane, highly qualified and very persuasive. He is however the chairman of the Kazakhstan National Bank and the country he describes is not one its inhabitants are entirely familiar with.

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.

The most dynamic of Russia’s companies are relatively small compared with the energy and utility behemoths. Typically manufacturing consumer goods with a rapid payback from investment, they have been able, so far, to grow using their own resources.

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.

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.

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.

Russia’s three biggest monopolies – the companies that control gas and electricity production and supply, and the railways – need heavy investment and reorganization. President Putin is trying to push through change but he is dealing with “states within the state”.

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.

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.

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