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Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez may have worried democrats with his moves to curb congressional powers but for debt underwriters and investors it promises to be good news. The reforms have made it easier for Venezuela to issue and the country is set to join other emerging-market sovereigns returning to the international capital markets this year.

Like most emerging markets Argentina is unused to hostile takeover bids and certainly not those on the scale of Repsol's bid for YPF. To some analysts the takeover is a case of a company with a poor investment record in Latin America -- Spain's oil company Repsol - gaining control of a well-managed firm - YPF has been remodeled since privatization with a clear strategy and strong balance sheet. They warn of the dangers of leveraged takeovers.

Two months ago, Stephen Saali had plans. The bank of which he is president, Republic New York Corporation, had been through a rough six months. Republic, which is ultra-conservative in its approach and proud of it, had tarnished its image with a $200 million loss betting on Russian treasury GKOs during the Russian crisis, and reported a third-quarter loss as a result.

Portugal: Bigger should be even better

Central America: A whole new way of thinking

In his state-of-the-nation address last month the president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, was full of free-market fire. He berated the assembled lawmakers for the slow pace of economic reforms in what is the most populous of the five Central Asian states and called on them to to push forward with political and economic reforms. He then went on to make what were some of the most radical statements of his career, promising to finally allow convertibility of the soum, the national currency, by 2000. Among the foreign investor community in Tashkent the speech was met by a round of yawns. They had heard it all before. The investment climate in Uzbekistan has been getting slowly worse over the past three years with the government, all the time, tightening control of the few foreign companies still sticking it out in Tashkent. The Russian crisis has hit the Uzbek economy hard. Russia used to account for nearly half of all this cash-strapped country's exports.

Iceland's financial markets will barely be recognizable by the end of the year, such is the pace of change. Having opened its markets to foreign investment, the country is now pressing ahead with privatization. Rebecca Bream reports

The contrasting economic fortunes of the core of Europe and those at the edge of, or outside, the euro area persist. The consensus view has been that euroland economic growth will begin to accelerate this year and that there will be a slowdown (or even recession in the case of the UK) in the periphery.

Issuer: Hutchison Whampoa

Given the number of banking and commercial agreements written under English law, bankers and corporate lawyers need to be aware of new litigation rules in the UK. By Christopher Stoakes