Search results for

Ecuador's financial crisis came to a head in mid-March. With 10 banks closed or subject to state intervention in the past nine months, depositors have lost confidence. A major run on the banks was only avoided when the government declared a week-long bank holiday on March 8 and imposed a freeze on $1.5 billion in sucre and dollar deposits, for up to a year. Already struggling to cut a severe fiscal deficit, the government could not make good immediately on last year's legislation guaranteeing deposits. Now it is looking for help from international auditors and multilateral financiers to cleanse, downsize and recapitalize banks.

How do you combine a career in structured finance with trips to the Cannes film festival and seats at the best soccer matches in Europe? Dorian Klein, managing director of European structured finance at Merrill Lynch in London, makes it part of the job. For the past year and a half his team has worked with intellectual property rights, pulling off a major film rights securitization last year.

Is the tide about to turn for the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE)? With major companies trading at very low P/E ratios, and with prospects of greater political stability, surely this is an emerging market that has been too long overlooked? Nigerian Bottling Company managers seem to think so. In March NBC did a N3.5 billion ($38 million) rights issue, Nigeria's largest ever.

The race towards a pan-European exchange speeded up on March 11 when Borsa Italiana, the Italian stock market, agreed to cooperate with the Paris and Swiss bourses in their effort to create a single market for the new century.

The volume of money raised by European private equity funds continues to grow. Much of that money is flowing in the belief that continental Europe is close to developing the sort of buy-out and start-up culture which has long produced spectacular returns for venture capitalists in the US. In late March Apax Partners closed a €1.8 billion ($1.9 billion) pan-European fund. It has the distinction of being the largest private equity fund for Europe denominated in the new currency, but it joins an already large pool of funds, much of it denominated in dollars, which is dedicated for investment in private European companies.

The Germans are at it again. Amid a big diplomatic punch-up, the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision failed to release its long-awaited consultation paper on credit risk control and capital adequacy on April 9.

Why did Morgan Stanley Dean Witter decide in January to move the irrepressible Riccardo Pavoncelli from head of European debt capital markets to head its European media industry group.

Have you been wondering what, if anything, can cause bank stocks to fall? Last year's crisis managed to do it, but now it would appear to be little more than a temporary blip. And in the US at least, the first quarter of 1999 has been a profits bonanza for most of the banks, even for the likes of JP Morgan, which had been stuck in the return-on-equity doldrums for several years.

Australia: After the gold rush

Who is Alice in euroland? Is it the average euro-punter watching his assets disappear down a deflationary rabbit hole? According to Willem Buiter, Cambridge economics professor and a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, the white rabbit is the European Central Bank (ECB). It's operating on flawed principles, he says in a paper, Alice in euroland, published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Hoping that his criticism will be constructive, he recommends the ECB should have greater accountability – publishing its minutes and answering to a parliamentary/judicial committee – and a smaller governing council and executive board, so it can act more promptly. Above all it should have the role of lender of last resort, so that, like the US Federal Reserve, it can stand behind the currency and, implicitly, support the major credit institutions when they're strapped for cash.

Custody: Custody is dead, long live custody

The pie may be getting smaller but the top players are taking bigger slices. However, as Jack Dyson reports, the largest foreign-exchange firms are having to work ever harder to carve out a point of difference in a mature market with thin margins. In our eagerly-awaited annual foreign-exchange poll, Citigroup stays ahead of Deutsche by a whisker. Research by Rebecca Cicolecchia.