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

Next year, the world economy will shrink. Only Europe will have moderate growth. Wealth destruction will produce a growth recession in the US. Japan will continue to emulate an economic black hole in the middle of a time warp. Emergent economies' growth will be negative.

To lose one fortune, Mr Meriwether, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two fortunes looks like carelessness.

A decline in oil prices and a regional economic crash should be bad news for an oil-based economy in south-east Asia. But Brunei is insulated from the worst of this economic turbulence. And this quiet country of 300,000 people is focused on the longer term. Nigel Ash reports

Some of the bigger players in European equities reckon the single currency isn't a major driver of the sectoral approach - they were heading that way long ago and the real goal is to look at sectors globally. As Emu approaches, though, smaller local brokers will have to adapt to the new ways or go under. Some will sink but others will survive on specialist knowledge, particularly of small and mid-cap companies. Julian Marshall and Sudip Roy report.

The anonymous poet of UBS has been moved to add a coda to his famous Christmas 1997 ballad "Bonus in the bin" (Euromoney, March 1998).

Down but not out

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

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.

It is rare that the interests of investors and issuers coincide exactly, and when they do they have generally been forced to. That is what has happened in the European convertible market. Right now, this halfway-house hybrid does make sense as a defensive outperformer for investors, and a cheap, flexible funding tool for corporates and privatizing governments. Simon Brady reports.

High-yield bond analysts usually resign themselves to a constant treadmill of visits to engineering firms, chemicals plants and pet food factories as they tirelessly assess the worth of the world's corporates.