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In the film "Blame it on Rio", Michael Caine plays a middle-aged man with marital problems who falls for his best friend's daughter during a holiday in Rio de Janeiro. The heady atmosphere of one of the world's most alluring cities is apparently the cause of this lapse in judgement. If only it were just a movie.

Antipathy between the Inter-American Development Bank's biggest shareholders -Brazil and the US - is long-standing. But when Brazil faced financial ruin they struck a new deal: the IDB can now fund IMF-style emergency lending programmes, and turn its soft-currency reserves into concessionary loans. But the bank's smaller members resent how the deal was done, and it has stoked up political and ideological differences among the staff. Brian Caplen reports.

No single benchmark yield curve has emerged for the euro. So there is some confusion about how Eurobond issues should be priced. That anomaly raises deeper questions about how government debt and its derivatives will trade in future and which electronic platform will grab the lion's share. David Shirreff reports.

Antonio Ortiz Mena is one of the outstanding Latin American economic policymakers of this century. In 12 years as Mexico's finance minister and 17 years as the president of the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB), as well as periods in other important posts in the Mexican government, Ortiz Mena has been involved in virtually all key economic challenges facing the region over the last 50 years.

Bankers who risk billions every day at work often turn out to be adrenaline addicts in their spare time. Guy Hands, the UK's highest-paid financier and enigmatic leader of Nomura's principal finance group is one such. He has just pumped a sizeable chunk of his £40 million-a-year package into Rockingham motor-racing track in Northamptonshire, the first purpose-built oval track to open in the UK since 1907.

How best to track performance in the European bond markets is hotly debated by the region's bond-trading firms. There will be rich rewards for the index compilers that come out on top in euroland. But defining the market to meet investors' needs is proving a challenge. Peter Lee reports.

Behind the thriving anarchy of China's coastline there's an industrial hinterland that is depressed, debt-ridden and still largely state-controlled. Few bosses of the state-owned enterprises there have the power to cut their workforce or pay bonuses. Even if they do, the state-owned banks are keeping them and the competition on life-support. Overcapacity, pollution and poverty are omnipresent, part-mitigated by the huge Three Gorges Dam project, which employs 25,000 people and will displace two million. Euromoney's Steven Irvine followed investment scout Richard Tsiang into the interior to see China's true economic heartland - a textile company that raise pigs, a salt plant with its eyes on a broadcast-equipment producer and a television factory that wants to give away its products

The Nordic region, with its concentration of internationally recognized corporates, prosperous retail markets and developed capital markets, is an attractive prize. The race to become the regional powerhouse is on. Euan Hagger reports.

"I know success is hard to write about, but you should congratulate the entire financial services industry - the banks, the broker dealers, the custodians, the clearing systems, the market-data providers - for their efficiency, commitment, resilience and professionalism," says Jacques Favillier, Emu project co-ordinator at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. Several weeks after the birth of the euro, there is still a note of faint disbelief in Favillier's voice that financial markets didn't suffer major disruptions during the changeover weekend. "It's been a big surprise. It's gone far better than I thought," he says.

After months of frustration, the foreign banks negotiating repayment of Russian debt are as divided among themselves as they are against the Russian government. Deutsche Bank's decision to accept the latest offer while leading a 19-bank committee still fighting over terms has caused uproar. Individual banks now have to decide whether to follow Deutsche's example or take legal action in a last-ditch attempt to recover some of the $40 billion in rouble debt on which the government defaulted last August. Jack Dyson reports.

Nordic banks: Jostling for supremacy

As Brazil picks up the pieces after its currency devaluation, it needs to fight off spiralling inflation and recession. The country's ability to regain investor confidence is crucial to the whole of Latin America. Jonathan Wheatley reports