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The conditions are right to transform this year's steady stream of European bank capital issues into a torrent. That is good news for firms who see these finely crafted products as one of the last areas of value in an increasingly low-margin bond business. Michael Peterson reports.

Author: Antony Currie

Excessive reliance on short-term foreign currency debt lay behind the Asian financial crisis. Asia needs local sources of long-term funding to prevent a recurrence, especially with the banking systems still so unhealthy. Bond markets in a range of local currencies are springing up, with active encouragement from financial authorities. Peter Lee reports.

Euromoney editor Peter Lee talked to Donald Tsang, finance secretary of Hong Kong, during his hectic visit to the UK in November. Though he is finance secretary of what is only a special autonomous region of China, Tsang cuts the figure of a fully fledged finance minister on the international stage. He shot to worldwide prominence last year when, in an extraordinary step for an official from a freewheeling free-market centre, he intervened massively in the local stock market, buying up HK$118.1 billion ($15 billion) of shares in response to an attack by international hedge funds that was set to spread from the stock market to a devaluation of the Hong Kong dollar.

Most Asian economies have in recent months recovered strongly from the 1997 crisis. But there's a distinct lack of irrational exuberance among both borrowers and lenders. The irresponsible big spenders have been cleared away and the best credits don't necessarily want to borrow at all. Banks aren't exactly falling over themselves to lend to responsible corporates that survived the crisis because of their prudence and integrity. But their merits are increasingly being recognized. Peter Lee reports.

Author: David Roche

Author: Michael Peterson

Asia 100 1999 - Cleaning the hives

Deals of the year - Top quality issuers succeed in demanding markets

The United States Senate confirmed Comptroller of the Currency John D Hawke, Jr in October for a five-year term. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) within the US treasury charters and regulates national banks, a total of approximately 2,400 institutions, including most large banks in the US as well as 59 federal branches and agencies of foreign banks in the US. But the OCC appears to be losing regulatory turf under the new modernization bill which grants authority to the Federal Reserve to regulate new financial holding companies.

Bad vibes in Bishopsgate

Latin America - Ghosts of the past haunt new dawn