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The Austrian powerhouses continue to make considerable investments in the region. Salomon Smith Barney is the most successful M&A house. Simon Brady, David Shirreff

Who could have dreamt that Korean online trading, almost non-existent two years ago, could be almost as large as that of the US?" So asked Andrew Sheng, chairman of Hong Kong's Securities&Futures Commission (SFC) in an address to the local Securities Institute delivered earlier this spring. Although online trading is gathering momentum across Asia, the speed with which it has been embraced by Korean investors has been staggering. As a report published on Korea's "internet laboratory" by Lehman Brothers early in March commented: "Over just a one-year period, online trading has grown from 4% of market turnover to 45%. Twenty-nine out of 31 domestic brokers now offer online broking services, and two million Korean investors have gone online."

Chartered Semiconductor has raised over $1 billion in one of the biggest equity deals from Asia this year. The May transaction was the largest ever follow-on offering from Singapore and the country's second-largest equity deal ever after Singapore Telecom's 1993 privatization.

"If I were Euromoney editor, I would beat up on institutional investors for the insanity they've been creating," says Allan Kennedy. He has written a book, The end of shareholder value, about the embracing of this ethic and its adverse aVect on business practices. Kennedy has seen the "insanity" spread at close quarters. He held a top position with McKinsey.

Remember the "vanguard of the proletariat" - that Marxist/Leninist menace. It turns out that the vanguard part is alive, well and very successfully managing about $550 billion in mutual fund assets from a suburb of Philadelphia. The Vanguard Group is America's second largest mutual fund complex. Almost half of its assets are in various index funds.

What are the biggest challenges to Pakistan's economic managers?

What is your mission at the finance ministry?

My name is Leon and I am going to London". It may have surprised Leon but all 357 people on board the Heathrow-bound plane from Johannesburg were going to London. Right plane, wrong seat. Leon was going to sit next to me. He filled the chair comfortably. So much so that the occupants on either side of him braced themselves for the battle of the bulge.

Default isn’t what it used to be. Sovereigns failing to honour their international obligations used to suffer. They couldn’t raise new money and the restructuring negotiations lasted for a decade. But times have changed. More than ever, sovereigns are tapping the bond markets which are proving a lot more flexible and forgiving than the old banking syndicates. A country can default, restructure and raise new money in a short space of time. With the help of rating agency Standard & Poor’s, Euromoney looks at the prospects for emerging-market sovereigns – in default or otherwise – as future bond issuers.

For a man who sparked India's dot.com goldrush Rajesh Jain sounds unfashionably old-economy. "It's not easy being an entrepreneur in India. When you don't have enough money, then you get really creative. People [read dot com entrepreneurs] are not thinking hard enough about how to make money; having a proWt model that works is still the key." Seven months ago, in November, this 32-year-old Indian engineer sold his four-year-old internet portal, IndiaWorld, to an Indian internet service provider, for an audacious $115 million cash.

Indian IT companies, eager to become global players, have no patience for the exchange control rules they face. But Indian officials and regulators are stuck in an era where capital was scarce and controls were needed to fence it in. It is a clash of two mindsets.