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Next time your bank appoints a law firm to conduct a piece of litigation, ask the firm to explain what it understands by "regret" and "the theory of the matter" By Christopher Stoakes.

This has been the year of the euro-denominated bond. Investors are happy to buy them for the yield pick-up; issuers are keen to establish their profile as borrowers in the new single currency. Meanwhile, bond arrangers are jockeying for position as the participants in monetary union are confirmed and the world's second largest capital market takes firm shape. But as Rebecca Bream reports, the banks are divided about the best way to prove that they have the expertise to arrange bonds in euros.

When there's not much left to merge in an industry the stakes rise and the government gets edgy. That's what Bear Stearns has found since it cornered the market in US defence M&A. Now, as Michelle Celarier reports, contractors and investment bankers are looking abroad for opportunities.

Leaders of Africa's new deal

State bail-outs for indebted, inefficient and over-politicized banks were supposed to be a thing of the past in Hungary. Not so. As its rivals rake in profits - transforming Budapest into the financial hub of eastern Europe - the country's second-largest financial institution, Postabank, has limped back to the warm milk of public funds for yet another capital increase as the government makes yet another push to find a buyer for the troubled bank.

Dennis Doherty is looking for an underwriter for the private placement of his new investment fund. If all goes according to plan, he will raise $250 million from institutional investors in the first two weeks of June. Then he can go and blow it all on paintings.

One continent - one stock market?

Visitors to this year's Asian Development Bank meeting in Geneva were less than impressed by the presentation given by the Indonesian contingent. While slick and technical, the central bank's plans did not address the critical issues still facing the country and by extension the region. As Asian finance ministers admitted in private, the real economy has ground to a halt. Trade finance has dried up and foreign banks will not accept letters of credit or guarantees from Indonesian banks for imports. In the absence of a multilateral system to overcome this problem, the band-aid of bilaterals is now being used. It is not enough.

The grass, they say, is always greener. In a rapidly consolidating industry a handful of global custodians control the clearing, settlement and reporting of the bulk of the world's trading. They're no longer satisfied with that. They want to execute the trades too. Andrew Capon reports.

At the end of April, Thomas Renyi, chief executive of Bank of New York, and several senior colleagues set off across America to persuade institutional shareholders in Mellon Bank of the value in the merger proposals Bank of New York first made public on April 22 in a letter to Mellon's directors. By appealing over the head of Mellon CEO Frank Cahouet - who swiftly rejected the proposal - Bank of New York has come within an ace of that rarest of things in the recent tumble of bank mergers: a hostile deal.

Leaders of Africa's new deal

"Five years from now, financial services will be virtually unrecognizable. The industry, like airlines and aerospace before it, will be dominated by a handful of national and global giants that will dwarf even the biggest players we know today." Although that's how consultants McKinsey predict developments in banking and insurance, it only echoes what every bank CEO is saying, in public or private. And they have very little time in which to answer the questions this trend raises: What is our role? Do we have the management talent to be a buyer? Should we give up and sell to the highest bidder?