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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.

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.

Deals of the Year

What do real tennis and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro have in common? Not a great deal, you would think, but Vincent Purton, the 39-year-old managing director of Daiwa Europe's debt origination desk is spending the first week of February heading towards the summit of the Tanzanian mountain, inspired, as he puts it, "by the rather arcane game of real tennis that I play. The professional who coaches us at Hampton Court suggested it last year, and I didn't need much persuading."

Turkey: Business must come before family

Deals of the Year

The first month of euro trading has come and gone, and the battle for short-term futures contracts rages on. Liffe, Eurex and Matif - the UK, German-Swiss, and French futures exchanges - have been competing for market share of three-month futures contracts since January 4. Already there have been disputes about which has made the most successful transition to the euro and which is most liquid.

Deals of the Year

Deals of the Year

Share buy-backs must be one of the most talked-about, most praised tools in the corporate restructuring kit. The Americans certainly like the strategy: in 1997 share buy-backs totalled $77 billion. But in Europe the hype has still to translate into reality. In the first 11 months of 1998 just $20.2 billion of stock was bought back, and $15 billion of that was generated by UK companies, according to figures from JP Morgan.