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The proposed merger between the Deutsche Börse and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) is meant to reduce transaction costs and consolidate the fragmented European market for equities. This rather lopsided plan has to win the vote of all interested parties and many political obstacles stand in its way. Even if it falls through, the LSE is now in play and should make sure it sells out to the highest bidder.

The nature of sovereign debt reschedulings is changing as private sector bail-ins of diverse groups of bondholders replace the Brady-style deals that used to be negotiated between borrowers and tight groups of creditors. Lawyers have their work cut out.

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.

Something has to give. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - America's colossal home mortgage securitizers - have been growing at about 11.5% per year. That's much faster than the market they serve: the underlying market for home mortgages in America is growing at only about 6% per year.

Eiichi Tanabe, acting general manager of Mitsubishi Corporation's finance department, declares that the trading company has not accessed the Eurobond markets since 1989 when it issued $1.5 billion of bonds with warrants. It is something of a trick answer - technically correct because the corporation itself has stayed away, but its London financial offshoot and other subsidiaries have remained active, with Mitsubishi Corporation Finance in London having a $12 billion programme of medium-term notes and Eurocommercial paper.

Brazil set out on a new course in 1999, both in the management of its economy and in its approach to the international capital markets. Concerns over the country's deficits provoked huge capital Xight and a currency devaluation last January. But Brazil did not tip over into crisis. President Fernando Enrique Cardoso, Wnance minister Pedro Malan and central bank governor Arminio Fraga have pushed through tough measures: cutting spending and increasing taxes so as to produce a primary (before debt service costs) public-sector surplus of 3% of GDP. This is the target for the next three years.

Issuer: Phillips Petroleum Co

The spilling over of Nasdaq volatility into emerging-market bonds has not amused their issuers. How can the fortunes of an internet start-up in Atlanta be intelligently compared with those of a tropical commodity producer, they ask, never mind that one is a company, the other a country?

In order to combat the Taiwan stock market's infamous volatility, oYcials in Taipei have come up with the idea of a National Stabilization Fund (NSF), whose job it is to intervene selectively and dampen down sharp stock market falls.