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Three Turkish lira denominated Euromarket public issues made this year open a niche market for investors who want to play with Turkish treasury bills without exposing themselves to the risks commonly associated with this high-yield paper.

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.

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.

In our review of Peter Spira's memoirs (Euromoney May, page 6) we failed to mention the title of the book. It is called Ladders and Snakes and you can buy it in London at Heywood Hill, Curzon Street and at Waterstones on Cheapside.

Japan's stock market has problems enough but the country's convertible bond market faces challenges of historic proportions. Once a premier source of funds for capital-hungry Japanese companies, the market has shrunk to a mere capital-markets sideshow, with the market index staggering ever downwards. Now the sector is returning to unwelcome prominence. The market faces colossal redemptions in fiscal 1998, amounting to ¥4 trillion ($30 billion). Efforts by some lowly rated issuers to scrape together the necessary funds to repay maturing convertibles - a burden they never expected - may become quite desperate, since these companies are already feeling the effects of a Japanese credit crunch.

The sad news of former City of London trader Terry Ramsden's imprisonment set us turning back to Euromoney 13 years ago.

Michael Spencer, founder chairman of derivatives broker Intercapital, and of gaming house City Index, should recognize good odds. He's prepared to offer them against the success of Liffe's much-touted euro swap contract, the Libor financed bond. "I bet 50-to-1 against the market trading 1,000 contracts a day on any single day before the end of this year," he tells Euromoney.

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.

Hi-tech comes to Europe