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The euro is a month old and already the new currency is bringing about changes more rapidly and more disconcertingly than expected. It is already clear that the removal of domestic currencies - and so the unique advantages enjoyed by local banks in their home markets - will wreak havoc with middle-tier institutions. In the payments business for example, it has only just dawned on the smaller German banks that their only asset was the Deutschmark. Without that domestic market, they will be unable to compete with the clearing giants. In the Eurobond markets, the euro will be the catalyst for more institutionalization of previously retail assets. This means the notion of local distribution will become meaningless. Local branches may sell a bank's new asset management service, but the bond-buying will be managed centrally. The winners will be the large underwriters with the best trading and research product. The losers will be banks whose operations were based on knowing pockets of local currency, largely retail investors. That is, most of them.

Sicily is famous all over the world for many reasons. Films such as The Godfather and novels such as The Leopard have brought fame to the Italian island, as well as the worldwide criminal organization known as the Mafia. But its name does not crop up very often in the financial news.

The devaluation of the Brazilian real has kept emerging markets at the top of bankers' and regulators' priority lists. As the crisis struck, the Malaysian second finance minister was on a tour of Europe designed to gather support for the country's controversial approach - an approach the minister insisted was working and would be continued indefinitely. More than a year on from the start of the crisis, there is still no consensus on what policies are appropriate for these troubled countries.

In a year in which deals of all shapes and sizes were pulled, plaudits go to all equity and bond issuers who were able to complete their deals at all. Some stars of the past - Asian project deals, Latin American corporate bonds and eastern European privatizations - barely made it to the finishing line. But one muscle-clad team of super-athletes swept the board in 1998. This was the year of the telecoms industry: from the stodgiest emerging-market monopoly to the most glamourous builder of fibre-optic networks, telecoms operators were everybody's favourite performers.

Last June, India's new finance minister, Yashwant Sinha, promised to speed up privatization and said a majority stake in ailing domestic carrier Indian Airlines would be sold. No finance ministers had yet dared to make a public commitment to privatization; they had all used the more politically correct word - disinvestment. By December, paralysed by a fractious coalition government and his party's drubbing in the regional elections, Sinha had managed to sell only a small stake in a rail-freight company for $53 million. In January, as he prepared this month's budget, he had few options left to plug the large deficit.

Brazilian telenovelas - the South American equivalent of soap opera - are not noted for their strong take on reality. Fantasy is more their stock in trade.

To the Big Bang Control Centre in Docklands where Reuters is preparing to convert its 520,000 terminals worldwide to the euro in one fell swoop at 1800GMT on Sunday January 3.

The logic of plugging together two industries - insurance and capital markets - is irrefutable and inevitable. But pricing insurance risk and selling it to investors is a painful process, frustrated by a glut of insurers selling their cover too cheaply. The visionaries are positioning themselves for a change in circumstances that could be swift and merciless, like the perils they're trying to insure. By David Shirreff.

Partly by luck, but as much because it was well structured, well organized and guaranteed to run to deadline, Brazil's auction of the state's controlling stake in telecoms provider Telebrás was a roaring success. Michael Peterson reports on why it came out as Euromoney's privatization of the year. Also, Brian Caplen looks at other notable Latin American deals and deal-makers of the year.

Minos Zombanakis is a pivotal figure in the history of the Euromarket. Known in the 1970s simply as "the Greek banker" (he was reckoned to be the only one of any note on the international scene), he was a combination of financial visionary, smooth salesman and masterful self-promoter. As one rather hostile magazine article remarked about his assault on the syndicated loans market: "It was one part nerve, one part histrionics and several parts pure fluff, but it did the job."

Deals of the Year

Deals of the Year