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In the leafy grounds of an 18th-century mansion in Kent, a month before Russia's August collapse, three dozen financial experts gather to rehearse a world financial meltdown. Forgoing the golf course, the lake, the tennis courts, gym and swimming pool, they settle down to pit their wits against the worst that disaster-monger David Shirreff can throw at them.

Life, but not as we know it

The calm before the storm

Life, but not as we know it

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).

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

Which banks will weather the storm?

Britain's leading corporate banker needs a drastic solution to the problem of low margins. Rolling up 200 of the best loans and selling them as bonds is certainly that. But it has invoked a ferocious response from corporate treasurers and competitors. Brian Caplen reports on the controversy surrounding the deal

Corporate bonds are even less developed in Scandinavia that in the rest of Europe, but a ratings culture could change all that.

A well-trodden path leads from Eton College through Oxford University to the City of London. Christopher Mackenzie followed it, adding McKinsey, JP Morgan and Schroders. That conjures up a picture of institutional orthodoxy, but Mackenzie says he has always felt somewhat outside the formidable British establishment.

Meet some of the world's biggest investors. The 10 largest Japanese life insurance companies control assets of more than $1 trillion. But with a protected market and no shareholders to answer to, they have always done things a little differently to the rest of us. Now as insolvency fears and foreign competition grow, that is starting to change. Jack Lowenstein reports.

It's the only private-sector bank to have retained its triple-A rating. What's more, Rabobank is the only foreign bank to have an office in Wagga Wagga. This cooperative, with 467 member banks in the Netherlands, was viewed as a domestic farmers' bank. But for three years that has been changing. First there were moves into insurance and asset management in the Netherlands. Then, for the past year-and-a-half, Rabobank International has been developing as an investment bank. Antony Currie spoke to Henk Visser, member of Rabobank Group's managing board, and Alex von Ungern-Sternberg, head of global investment banking.