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Professional headhunters might have avoided the farce surrounding the appointment of the IMF’s new managing director. But the politics of who runs the IMF and the World Bank are complex, and there’s no way to please all of the shareholders all of the time.

Malaysia seems to have recovered better from the Asian crisis than some other countries in the region, not least because of the currency control policies that were introduced. Confidence was shaken a little last month by the volatility in US markets, but the fundamentals still appear to be sound.

Euromoney polled heads of Eurobond and government bond trading, asking them to nominate the top three houses at trading bonds in specific markets. This year, the survey was revised to reflect the recent structural changes on many bond trading desks. We received 52 replies in total.

Economies in the Middle East are in good shape for forthcoming bond issues, though some sovereign issuers have been deterred by the spread on Qatar's 1999 Eurobond. Lack of sovereign benchmarks has, until now, held back corporate issues but that may soon change.

Hotels and airlines are gearing up for a bumper year of business travel. What are their customers most looking for? Euromoney polled more than 160 business executives on where they like to stay, city by city, and their favourite – and least favourite – airline.

At the beginning of 1999, so the story goes, corporate Europe suddenly got religion about shareholder value. In the wake of the introduction of the euro, a wave of corporate restructuring swept the continent. Lured by growing investor appetite for credit - and with a little nudging from their bankers - Europe's companies plunged into the bond markets. The result was an explosion of corporate bond issuance.

French brokers, like those in other single-currency zone countries, are gradually adapting to a pan-European market. While investors are holding on to domestic equities, they are also boosting portfolios with other European stocks.

Latvia is small. Latvia is very small. Latvia is so tiny, in fact, that you may have trouble getting a price for the Latvian Eurobond or Hansabank, the largest bank in the Baltics and number one equity issue on the Riga stock exchange. If you ring up the London switchboard of any mega-global-super bank claiming to make a market in everything from options on timber futures to weather derivatives for Lesotho, and then ask for the Latvian desk, after a few minutes on hold you'll wind up speaking to PR. And then explaining where Latvia is located.

The alchemists sought to transform base metals into gold, but the IMF seems bent on turning ingots into dross. When president Bill Clinton's millennial offer to forgive the debts of the globe's poorest nations was blocked by mining interest protests against IMF gold sales, US Treasury strategists stayed up late over the Bunsen burners. Had the accounting subterfuge they cooked up to fulfil their promise been designed by one of the big five auditing firms for a megabank client, the US Treasury itself, the Securities&Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve would have been lining up to clamp on the handcuffs.

The initial public oVering of T-Online, a German company owned primarily by Deutsche Telekom, provided some respite for a turbulent technology market when its shares climbed 39% on their Wrst day of trading.

On January 24, six banks announced plans to launch www.BondClick.com, a website set up to enable investors to trade European government bonds online. More than three months later, all is still quiet on the BondClick front.

The beautiful island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean is today a key outpost for a liberalizing India, thanks to an obscure tax treaty. Nearly half India's foreign portfolio investment, currently around $ 11.7 billion, is routed through the island and so is a large chunk of foreign direct investment.