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On finding large gaps in its 1999 budget, the Italian treasury decided to deal with one notorious problem - delinquent social securities payments - in an unusual way, by simply selling them. It was a bold and intriguing deal and led to plenty of arguments among the banks that bid for it. But it produced a hefty cost saving for the Italian treasury.

Belize may be part of Central America, but it is a world away from Guatemala City, San Salvador or San José. The entire Atlantic coast of Central America, from Belize to the western tip of Panama, shares an English-speaking Caribbean culture that co-exists uneasily with the bulk of Spanish-speaking Central America.

When Argentina needed to raise money last year, it could not easily convince investors to buy its credit. Though usually it is one of the busiest Latin American borrowers, with annual funding needs of around $10 billion, investors were not well disposed towards emerging markets generally. And Argentina, already at a low Ba3/BB rating, faced further possible downgradings. It had been hit by a recession, high funding costs, and a presidential election to be held in October. To make matters worse, in June Peronist party candidate Eduardo Duhalde spoke of not repaying all of the country's debt. Though he quickly reassured investors that he did not mean that Argentina should default, a tremor of unease passed through the international bond markets.

Dan Case couldn't do it. Roddy Fleming couldn't do it. Even Neal Garonzik, long-time friend of Chase CEO William Harrison, couldn't do it. Through all the quiet discussions to buy a top investment bank and the change of tack last year to build through smaller acquisitions, vice-chairman Jimmy Lee remained king of Chase's investment banking heap.

"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.

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.

Germany's Rheinhyp has convincingly kept its lead this year in the covered bond sector with a string of deals put together by a dedicated structured Wnance team that has only been in place for just over a year. Rheinhyp's securitization of its European commercial mortgages across several countries broke new ground in Europe's cross-border structured Wnance markets. Even though the legal hurdles for such a deal might have proved insurmountable, Rheinhyp and Barclays Capital together found a structure that should ignite interest from other asset-backed issuers to use similar synthetic structures to place pan-eurozone portfolio deals into the market.

Largest banks by country

A single organization did more than any other last year to breath new life into the market for Japanese international borrowings. It goes under the unfamiliar name of Japan Bank for International Cooperation or JBIC - pronounced Jaybic - as almost everyone who deals with it now calls it. JBIC made two landmark issues last year: the first in early February was an innovative $1 billion floating-rate note issue under its old name of Export-Import Bank of Japan (Jexim); then in October JBIC launched its new name with a 10-year $1 billion fixed-rate offering in the Eurodollar market.

Whatever criticisms may be made of Ana Patricia Botín, she certainly inherited her father's entrepreneurial talent. During her 10 years at Santander she pushed the investment bank forward at a hectic speed, recruiting top bankers and at one stage harbouring ambitions that it could become a global player. The emphasis was on emerging markets, however, and she firmly implanted the Santander Investment franchise in Latin America such that when the bank wanted to acquire retail banks in the region, experienced dealmakers were in position to negotiate for them. Ana Patricia didn't stop there. Her vision was to have a huge flow of emerging-market securities that could add to the Latin flow already going through the New York and London hubs to investors. She was expanding Santander into Mediterranean countries such as Egypt and Turkey and when the Asian investment bank Peregrine failed, she picked up a team of 130 equities specialists in February 1998. She also took on the running of the Latin American retail banks and headed the search for a bank in Portugal. In late 1997, when Santander Investment was merged into the commercial bank, she acquired responsibility for wholesale banking and treasury.

Consolidation continues to shake up the tables as restructuring sweeps both developed and developing nations alike. Research by Andrew Newby.

It might not have the funding needs of the World Bank, the US agencies or large corporates such as Ford, but the Inter-American Development Bank has done a good job of keeping its name in investors' minds by appealing to the leitmotivs of fixed-income investing: keep it big, and keep the investors informed