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Why did NatWest refuse Deutsche Morgan Grenfell's offer of £150 million ($248 million) for the equity operations of NatWest Markets?

Never let it be said that Euromoney doesn't break new ground in its tireless coverage of finance. Last year we brought you the news, from Bowie bonds to Chechen bonds, financing lapdancing to book-writing bankers.

Asia's crisis brought bond issuance in central and eastern Europe to an abrupt halt. The region's issuers, tarred with the same brush as south-east Asia, have seen their spreads widen dramatically. So what will tempt investors back? And how long will it take? Robert Minto finds out.

Spanish banking is clearly segmented by strategy, domestic banks competing for the retail markets and foreign banks heavily involved in offering services to multinationals and attempting to develop lower-level corporate business. With some privatizations still to be undertaken and rapid development of the equity market at both issuer and investor level there's substantial growth to play for. Margaret Popper reports.

Lending to European borrowers backed by a government guarantee should be as safe as houses. But beware of the state aid rules, warns Christopher Stoakes.

It's just under a year until the start of European monetary union, and you would expect banks to be pulling out all the stops. But while they wrestle night and day with the technical details, little is being done to inject some fun into the proceedings. Salomon Smith Barney is leading the pack with its "Countdown to Emu calendar" - displaying the number of weeks left until January 1 1999 - recently erected in the firm's lobby.

Last National Bank of Boot Hill,

It's often said that Hong Kong moves faster than other places. And staff at Indosuez WI Carr can testify to just how quickly life can change. In the space of a week the firm went from all the bacchanalia associated with a bull market to huge job cuts.

If you're impressed with the inexplicably long hours your colleagues have been putting in over the past couple of months, ask them what they've been up to. They may be part of the growing number whiling away the small hours playing computer games such as Doom, a virtual-reality shoot-'em-up game of extreme violence.

A native of Calicut, India, Arjun Mathrani was one of a cadre of foreign-born bankers groomed for leadership at what was historically the most international of US financial institutions: Chase Manhattan Bank. But now Mathrani has become one of the last of such senior executives to leave at a time when the bank seems less internationally focussed.

Few bankers would include the fact that they were once a scout on their CV, "as a joke". But Peter Luthy is not, perhaps, an ordinary banker. A fit-looking and apparently easy-going 46, he gives off a convincing sense of having squeezed the most out of life. He spent two years in his early 20s working as an idealistic carpenter in New Jersey and another two in his late 30s as a wealthy non-worker, travelling the world with his milliner wife Candace and skiing wherever the opportunity arose - 100 days a year.

And then there were three