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Long-time observers of European banking may feel they have heard enough about banking alliances. Time and again these have been launched amid great fanfare only to come to little. BSCH's task is to convince investors that its alliances contain greater substance.

The wisdom of spending $10 billion buying Latin America banks has not always been crystal clear to analysts but the results are starting to come through. In the first quarter, BSCH's Latin American banks earned nearly $200 million, 69% up on the first quarter of 1999, and roughly 40% of the total. By contrast Spanish retail banking managed a meagre 4% increase in profits.

What do you give to a man who has everything? For her husband, Alison Lutnick chose a round of golf with Tiger Woods. For $51,000 husband Howard, CEO of inter-dealer broker Cantor Fitzgerald, joined three others in playing 18 holes with golfer Woods last month.

After issuing the largest dollar deal ($1 billion) in December 1998, Telekomunikacja Polska (TPSA) delivered the largest euro-denominated corporate issue from the region in October 1999. It was another textbook deal.

Chilean telephone company Compania de Telecomunicaciones de Chile's (CTC) Wve-year e200 million bond deal last July was one of the brightest and most fought over deals to come out of Latin America in the past year. Mandates to bring Chile's leading telecom company to the market were hotly contested. They eventually went to Germany's Dresdner Kleinwort Benson and Spain's BBV. The two bookrunners, helped along by JP Morgan and ABN Amro as joint leads, managed to bring the deal to market at incredibly tight margins.

When a number of Korean Wnancial institutions were looking to raise capital through a bond issue, Hanvit Bank beat them all. Then Hanvit dared to make its issue a two-tranche deal and raised $850 million.

Largest banks by country

Largest banks by country

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.