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They're shark-infested investment waters out there. Nasdaq, the US tech sector index, continues to plunge and most indices worldwide are now well down for the year. The US March inflation figures started the rot, even though April's appeared more benign. Real GDP and employment cost data for the first quarter of 2000 show a red-hot economy with rising labour costs. It would have been difficult to invent a more bearish set of macro numbers. So it was no surprise that last month the US Federal Reserve hiked the interest rate by 50 basis points and indicated that it was ready to raise it again unless there were signs of a slowdown. There won't be, so expect another 50bp before the summer is over.

Wholesale financial services firms have made great play of their internet ventures in the last year, seeking to present themselves both as being internet-enabled and as pioneers in reshaping financial markets. Yet in reality few firms have done any more than take their traditional businesses and put them online. The true capacity of the internet to transform financial market structures has yet to be unleashed, although pure trading is changing fast. Maybe some of the self-styled pioneers want to hold this transforming power in check. They won't succeed for long, reports Antony Currie

The Asian Development Bank's May governors meeting included sessions where bankers spoke candidly about the problems faced by the region's financial sector.

Why can Polish companies raise $1 billion a year by floating new stock in Warsaw while their counterparts in Prague come up with zilch? Andrei Shleifer of Harvard University thinks he has the answer and presented some of his latest research, joint work with Edward Glaeser and Simon Johnson, at the US Federal Reserve last month.

It wasn't so long ago that fund managers, investors and equity analysts joked that Chile was like a popular make of cockroach trap that worked by luring the critter inside a box whose door wouldn't open outwards.

It’s been a tough year for many borrowers in the international capital markets. Corporate issuers in particular have fallen quickly from grace, having been the market’s darlings a year ago. Now fixed income investors across the world are increasingly risk-averse. Certain sectors of the primary markets, US high yield for example, are very difficult to access. In response to these troubles, many of those borrowers that bankers and investors have nominated to be awarded for their efforts in the past 12 months have reverted to a strategy first made popular by Fannie Mae two years ago. They are striving to produce large, liquid benchmark issues that will at least give investors the comfort that they can easily trade in and out. Where Fannie Mae, our borrower of the year, has led, others, such as Ford, our best corporate borrower, and even smaller issuers such as Brazil, our best sovereign, and IADB, best supranational, have followed.The best corporate, sovereign, financial and securitization borrowers from Europe, central and eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America

Kazakhstan launched its comeback deal in September 1999. A Wve-year $200 million issue demonstrated that Kazakhstan, despite being rated single-B and a neighbour to troublesome Russia, does have access to the international markets. The bond was, in fact, the Wrst issue from the Commonwealth of Independent States following the Russian crisis of August 1998.

The US high-yield market has been in retreat for the past 18 months, some would say even longer, since the near-meltdown in the credit markets after Russia defaulted on its domestic debt in August 1998. Issuance so far this year is 49% down on 1999 levels, and it's been one of the longest periods of a Xat to negative performance in the asset class since the US market's revival in the early 1990s.

Denver-based Level 3 Communications set new records in the high-yield market in late February with a $2.2 billion bond deal that included the largest ever high-yield offering in euros. Not only did Level 3 raise e800 million, the largest ever non-dollar high-yield bond issue, it went on to raise more than $5 billion on the same day through parallel equity and convertible bond issues. "This really was a windfall deal for the borrower," says one of the co-lead managers. "I think Level 3 really surprised themselves with how much they could raise in the markets. This is certainly a landmark for them."

In March 2000, Indonesian company Asia Pulp&Paper (APP) was the Wrst Asian bond issuer to return to the markets after the Asian Wnancial crisis, with a $403 million 10-year bond deal issued in the name of APP China, but guaranteed by the group. Just weeks before the bond launch, another APP subsidiary, PT Indah Kiat, was also the Wrst Indonesian borrower to tap the international loan markets after the crisis in early 2000 with a reWnancing of a $400 million bank facility that was also guaranteed by the parent company.

Edgar Ancona and Bruce Foster were in Japan last month. This is nothing unusual for the treasurer and his vice-president of Household Finance, although a casual observer might wonder what a largely domestic US consumer Wnance company is doing over there.

With its e2.5 billion 2010 benchmark international bond launched in February, Greece has, in capital market terms, established itself as a de facto member of the eurozone. The launch price of 53 basis points over Bunds was the lowest cost of borrowing for Greece ever on such a deal, and marked a substantial reduction from the spread levels on previous deals in the high 50s.