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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

Fixed-income investors are piling into Hungary, gambling that interest rates will fall as it prepares for accession to the European Union. But is their enthusiasm justified? Charles Olivier reports.

"Clear your desk!" They're terrifying words in most offices. But if you work for ABN Amro, fear not. It's just part of the bank's "clean desk campaign".

Bankers might be forgiven for thinking that when lawyers get their teeth into a juicy case they make it run and run. But, warns Christopher Stoakes, we have still to hear the last of the swaps cases

Olivetti's bid for Telecom Italia will prove a watershed in European corporate finance whether it succeeds or not. First, it shows that the orgy of shareholder value-linked corporate restructuring promised by proponents of the euro will happen, and faster than anyone predicted. Second, it is proof that, however much Europeans may try to prevent it, what happens in the US eventually happens in Europe. This is an unprecedented hostile leveraged bid. At a stroke every European corporation has been forced to acknowledge that it is in play. And at a stroke it has created a US-style environment for investment banks, their corporate advisory teams and the leveraged lenders. Right now all over the eurozone corporations are hiring investment banks to explore defences and acquisitions of their own.

One does not mess with the head of the Botín clan, Spain's most powerful banking dynasty, even if you happen to be the boss's daughter.