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A year ago Deutsche Morgan Grenfell was set to challenge the US global investment banks. Then Frankfurt jammed on the brakes. A bank-wide restructuring has left DMG - now just the global corporate and institutions (GCI) department of Deutsche Bank - a pale shadow of its former self. Did the Deutsche Bank board lose its nerve or does it truly believe it can have an investment-banking culture without the investment bankers who inspired it?

The financial markets have never stood still. But rarely have they moved as quickly as they do today. The winners of all our awards by product sector are facing the same forces. Globalization is driving the market and firms are responding by consolidating. Take a careful look at the winners. They are sure to be very different next year.

Gardening leave for overworked bankers is perhaps one of the more agreeable spin-offs when one bank buys another. A recent beneficiary is Carol Barazzone, the former head of global equity syndicate at BZW, who quit in April four months after the sale to CSFB.

In Korea they call him the Baekmanbur-man, or the million-dollar man. Korea's first - and perhaps only - million dollar analyst surprised everyone last month when he decided to return to his old firm, four years after he'd left it.

Experienced Japan watchers are getting ever gloomier about the country's prospects. They cannot see any way out of the present gridlock. The banks, all their time and resources focused on non-performing assets, have reduced new lending so dramatically that the real economy is grinding to a halt. The rate of corporate bankruptcy is increasing and each new Tankan survey is more despairing than the last. Lack of liquidity is forcing good as well as bad out of business, creating more problems for the banks and forcing them to cut lending further.

Is this the biggest show in town?

Clearing equity trades in Moscow has never been as quick and easy a business as in other emerging European equity markets such as in Poland or Hungary. Failure of trades - when purchased shares are not delivered or sold shares are delivered but no cash is received - has plagued the Russian equity market for some time.

Sir,

An elegant and intellectual proposal, but will it fly? That's what swap dealers and analysts in London are asking themselves after a week of presentations in mid-May, by Liffe (the London International Financial Futures & Options Exchange) and its associates, of a revolutionary future based on swap rates.

Hi-tech comes to Europe

Chinese shares listed in Hong Kong have a habit of surprising investors. The latest issue is whether funds invested in high-interest deposits with Chinese banks are completely safe. The so-called H-shares are more used to reporting to the central planners than to shareholders - their workings can be mysterious. Pauline Loong reports.

There must have been a few hushed silences and maybe sighs of relief when the MTN dealer community heard the market's most aggressive borrower was set to hang up her spurs.