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Pulling away from the pack

Turkey's banks are among the most profitable in the world. Why? Because the government rewards them royally for getting Turkish citizens to pay for its debt. But this game is coming to an end. And the banks know they must sharpen up and do some real banking. David Shirreff reports

Private equity, venture capital or merchant banking - whatever you call it - is a hot area that banks and investors are piling into in Europe, importing US-style aggression and leverage techniques. It's not quite the fear and greed of the 1980s, but a market correction could shake some of the less prudent off their perch. Peter Lee reports.

Bathed in purple light at the official launch of the Financial Services Authority, Britain's new super-watchdog, its chairman, Howard Davies, proved to be a master of bureaucratic levity.

Two civil servants, the treasury secretary and the central bank governor, are spearheading Turkey's first credible attack on inflation in a decade. Both are graduates of Ankara's historic School of Political Science, the Mulkiye, as are many of the government's top decision-makers. A fellow graduate, Metin Munir, reports.

On the basis of his CV, Charles Frank appears to have been planning to join a multilateral organization all his career. He has strong academic credentials, experience in government as well as an impressive track record in banking and project finance.

A frenzy of deal-making has broken out in Indonesia as corporates rush to unload their stakes in everything from property and industrial subsidiaries to banks and finance companies in the wake of the currency and stock market crisis.

On October 3, Barclays chief executive Martin Taylor announced he was selling the equities and corporate finance divisions of his investment bank BZW. Only five weeks earlier he'd hired a high-profile banker to head BZW France. And only a year ago Taylor lured Bill Harrison from Robert Fleming to revamp the very divisions he's now put on the block. What went wrong? And what does it say about British banking's most celebrated chief executive? By Antony Currie.

To say that Chip Kruger is not well known in London is an understatement. Few UK bank analysts have met him or know much about him except that he used to co-run Greenwich Capital Markets, a successful bond-trading business in Connecticut, that was acquired by NatWest.

First the UK's new Labour government dropped hints that it was gearing up to join Europe's single currency earlier than expected, and before the full launch in 2002. Then it seemed to pull back and suggest that UK entry would not happen in the five-year life of the current parliament. That's made for continued uncertainty. Financial markets want to know when.

Just last spring, Raiffeisen Zentralbank, or RZB, had virtually no profile in the capital-markets industry of eastern Europe; the bank was known mainly in its domestic market, Austria, where it is a high-street bank with 2,500 branches. Last year the London office of RZB took up only a few floors of a non-descript building on a tiny side street. But over the past few months, the bank has shaken off its sleepy origins and has started actively poaching staff from larger firms and aggressively expanding into sales, trading, research and, more recently, investment banking.

Sandy Weill bounces back