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The difficulties faced by one quality borrower in 1998 contain lessons for all. Toyota Motor Credit Corporation ­ the captive financing vehicle for Toyota's US sales subsidiary in the US ­ has traditionally been one of the most sought after names in the Eurobond market. The scarcity value of its name and the strength of Toyota meant that deals came to the market tightly priced and then tightened further on launch. The bonds then disappeared into the safe hands of Europe's buy-and-hold ­ largely retail ­ investor base.

Highly rated borrowers fared better during last year's crisis than lower-rated credits. But spreads on their bonds still widened sharply. The bonds that held their price best were not just those of issuers with little exposure to emerging markets but those that were most liquid. By Luciano Mondellini

Investors are shunning emerging markets and wary that the US market is a bubble about to burst. With interest rates low, that makes European equities so much more attractive. But issuers know it could all go horribly wrong. They are rushing to the market before investor sentiment turns sour. And increasingly, as Antony Currie reports, the deals they want executed are block trades, secondary offerings and equity-linked bond deals, not the blockbuster privatizations that were once the mainstay of the market.

Following Emu, bond traders are scouring non-euro EU countries for the next convergence play hot-spots. Now that the main convergence-play currencies of recent times - Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal - are in the euro club, those non-euro countries that might join the euro over the next few years are attracting attention. Greece has emerged ahead of the UK, Sweden and Denmark as the most popular source of convergence plays.

After Brazil, could China's currency be the next to fall? Billions of dollars are said to have gone missing in foreign exchange over the past year - a development that Chinese officials are desperately trying to play down to minimize market jitters over the fate of the renminbi. At the end of 1998, the nation's forex reserves looked impressive at $145 billion. But they had risen by only $5 billion over 1998 despite a record trade surplus and strong inflows of foreign direct investment. Some China specialists calculate that almost $89 billion in trade and investment gains never found their way to the official coffers, despite the country's tough foreign-exchange regulations and central bank controls.

Smart investment bankers - the type who managed to turn catastrophe risk into an investment-grade asset class - should be eyeing up the fruits of litigation reform in the UK. By Christopher Stoakes

Deals of the Year

In Turkey business patriarchs never die, they simply fade away. In the wings their sons - rarely their daughters - prepare to take over, whether they're entrepreneurially inclined or not. But family-owned business heads are increasingly realizing that survival will depend on more formal structures. A few are even putting them in place. Metin Munir reports.

Banks can only sell risk if investors know exactly what they're getting. Institutions with blue-chip corporates in their loan portfolios won't have a problem, but smaller and regional banks find it almost impossible to sell their own risk in the credit derivatives market. Better credit research would help, but above all, they must learn to sell themselves. By Laura Covill.

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."

It's a firm that revels in its sense of history and values its independence. What it does, it does well - clearing, mortgage bonds, niche investment banking and just a little bit of prop trading. Nick Kochan goes inside Bear Stearns and gets a verbal memo from its combative chairman "Ace" Greenberg.

Deals of the Year