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Corporate bonds are even less developed in Scandinavia that in the rest of Europe, but a ratings culture could change all that.

Fund managers are deluged by research information. Brokers didn't really consider this when they first started providing data electronically. Now they've been persuaded that choice, not undifferentiated quantity, is what is wanted. Mary Cullinane and Simon Asplen-Taylor look at the latest developments.

Svenska Handelsbanken and ABN Amro and its subsidiary Alfred Berg are major players in regional expansion and integration of financial services in the Nordic countries.

The calm before the storm

Down but not out

The calm before the storm

Meet some of the world's biggest investors. The 10 largest Japanese life insurance companies control assets of more than $1 trillion. But with a protected market and no shareholders to answer to, they have always done things a little differently to the rest of us. Now as insolvency fears and foreign competition grow, that is starting to change. Jack Lowenstein reports.

In the leafy grounds of an 18th-century mansion in Kent, a month before Russia's August collapse, three dozen financial experts gather to rehearse a world financial meltdown. Forgoing the golf course, the lake, the tennis courts, gym and swimming pool, they settle down to pit their wits against the worst that disaster-monger David Shirreff can throw at them.

Beware the legal pitfalls of receivables financing if you are new to the game, says Christopher Stoakes.

Gardening leave can be a dull experience. There's only so much time you can spend lying on a beach, or learning about fine wines. Mark Eban came up with an altogether more exhaustive pastime before taking up his position as head of global equity capital markets at Commerzbank earlier this year.

In the depressed Japanese stock market, foreigners are quietly raising their stakes. By the end of March this year, foreign ownership accounted for a record 13.4% of listed Japanese stocks, according to data from the National Conference of Stock Exchanges. The rate has been steadily rising for the past 10 years from 4.3% in 1988. Last year, ending March, saw a 1.5% jump in foreign investment, even as the overall market lost value.

Thirty hours before the LTCM debacle hit the newswires Bill McDonough, chairman of the New York Fed, warned an audience of credit quants in London of a "situation which I regard by some considerable margin as the most dangerous since the Second World War". Of course the quants saw it as an attack on their credit models, which, obliquely, it was: which modeller had Meriwether on the radar screen? But McDonough may also have been referring to another threat to the US banking system: the move of Herbie, Euromoney's superbanker, who has been under his distant surveillance for nearly 20 years, back to Boot Hill headquarters in Arizona. David Shirreff