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Different ways to skin a cat

Making up the rules in Brazil

Top 100 Arab Banks: Waiting for the after-shock

The market, like nature, is red in tooth and claw. It has no concept of ethics, morality or justice. Its agents are predatory and are concerned mainly with their own survival. They have no thought for the good of the system. That doesn't mean the market is bad or that it doesn't work. It means that present prescriptions for emerging economies do not reflect these realities. Nothing highlights more starkly the inappropriateness of the blind application of free market thinking to emerging markets more than the role of hedge funds. By Simon Brady.

Their mini resolution trust is named after a bottom-dwelling, scum-sucking shellfish and the promoters of the Mytilus fund indeed expect to play a very useful role extracting value from the sunken casualties that lurk in Asia's distressed-debt securities markets.

Must the IMF grow in size just to stomach the next bail-out, or should it reinvent itself as a tougher, global rating agency of countries and their banking systems? Such an IMF would not whisper advice into the ear of crony capitalists and then pay off their creditors - it would be a lean, mean agent of transparency and would deal out pain where pain is due. James Smalhout reports.

Making up the rules in Brazil

Making up the rules in Brazil

Making up the rules in Brazil

Different ways to skin a cat

When their country was isolated by sanctions, South African banks had it easy. Now foreign competitors are eating away at their share of the most profitable business. Sam Swiss reports.

Long, long ago, when half the world was ruled by men who still believed in state control of the economy, Poland took the gamble of letting the market decide the price of goods. That dose of shock therapy in 1989 became a model for eastern Europe. The man who imposed it became one of the region's leading economic thinkers. Now he is back at the helm of the Polish economy. James Rutter talks to Leszek Balcerowicz about history, movies and the trials of coalition government.