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Fixed-income investors are piling into Hungary, gambling that interest rates will fall as it prepares for accession to the European Union. But is their enthusiasm justified? Charles Olivier reports.

As Brazil picks up the pieces after its currency devaluation, it needs to fight off spiralling inflation and recession. The country's ability to regain investor confidence is crucial to the whole of Latin America. Jonathan Wheatley reports

It's just over two weeks since Márcio Cypriano was named president of Banco Bradesco, Latin America's largest private-sector bank. He's relaxed about it, often chuckling as he formulates an answer. Márcio Artur Laurelli Cypriano's laid-back attitude should be helpful in an environment in which currencies and the rules of the game change frequently. Referring to the Brazilian government's disastrous attempt to make an 8% controlled devaluation of the real on January 13, followed by the currency's collapse when it was allowed to float on January 15, Cypriano says: "In 50 years, we've had 19 currencies and indexers. Many times the indexers are confused with a currency."

Antonio Ortiz Mena is one of the outstanding Latin American economic policymakers of this century. In 12 years as Mexico's finance minister and 17 years as the president of the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB), as well as periods in other important posts in the Mexican government, Ortiz Mena has been involved in virtually all key economic challenges facing the region over the last 50 years.

For this, our 27th ranking of the world's countries by creditworthiness, we have altered the scoring slightly. We have included a measure of per capita income into the score given for economic performance. This has boosted the ranking of a number of countries - especially smaller ones -which were previously penalized because little data was available on their economic performance (see methodology).

The Nordic region, with its concentration of internationally recognized corporates, prosperous retail markets and developed capital markets, is an attractive prize. The race to become the regional powerhouse is on. Euan Hagger reports.

Bankers who risk billions every day at work often turn out to be adrenaline addicts in their spare time. Guy Hands, the UK's highest-paid financier and enigmatic leader of Nomura's principal finance group is one such. He has just pumped a sizeable chunk of his £40 million-a-year package into Rockingham motor-racing track in Northamptonshire, the first purpose-built oval track to open in the UK since 1907.

"I know success is hard to write about, but you should congratulate the entire financial services industry - the banks, the broker dealers, the custodians, the clearing systems, the market-data providers - for their efficiency, commitment, resilience and professionalism," says Jacques Favillier, Emu project co-ordinator at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. Several weeks after the birth of the euro, there is still a note of faint disbelief in Favillier's voice that financial markets didn't suffer major disruptions during the changeover weekend. "It's been a big surprise. It's gone far better than I thought," he says.

A good dose of Anglo-Saxon culture is what the European Central Bank needs on its executive board, and the quickest way to achieve that is for the UK to join the euro. This isn't UK prime minister Tony Blair speaking, it's Francesco Giavazzi, economics professor at Bocconi University in Milan.

One does not mess with the head of the Botín clan, Spain's most powerful banking dynasty, even if you happen to be the boss's daughter.

Antipathy between the Inter-American Development Bank's biggest shareholders -Brazil and the US - is long-standing. But when Brazil faced financial ruin they struck a new deal: the IDB can now fund IMF-style emergency lending programmes, and turn its soft-currency reserves into concessionary loans. But the bank's smaller members resent how the deal was done, and it has stoked up political and ideological differences among the staff. Brian Caplen reports.

Bankers might be forgiven for thinking that when lawyers get their teeth into a juicy case they make it run and run. But, warns Christopher Stoakes, we have still to hear the last of the swaps cases