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Which are Asia's most sophisticated borrowers? This is the question Euromoney put to 16 heads of debt syndication in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. As spreads widen and credit ratings fall, these are lean times for Asian borrowers. Only the best - those who have spent the past few years developing an innovative approach and building up a good name - will be able to get their bonds away. By Nicholas Bradbury.

It is one of the boldest economic plans of the century: China wants to sell or merge its state-owned enterprises - nearly half the country's economy. Jack Lowenstein reports on the difficulties ahead.

Euromoney's annual ranking of Asian banks reveals a number in severe difficulty. But there is surely worse to come: the effects of the region's currency and stock market problems have not yet registered in many banks' accounts. Our rankings comprise the Japanese top 50, the Asian 100 - for all of Asia excluding Japan - and regional tables for south-east Asia, Australasia, Indian sub-continent and north Asia excluding Japan. By Rebecca Dobson.

When Brazil's stock and bond markets lost a third of their value in late October as part of the Asian contagion, the country's central bank intervened quickly to defend the real against currency speculators, raising interest rates from 21% to 43%.

It is hard to judge which was the worst piece of news to hit the Malaysian stock market and corporate community in the last few months. Was it the remarks made by prime minister Mahathir Mohamad blaming international speculators for the Asian meltdown?

Now that the high profile equity and corporate finance advisory parts of BZW have been sold, members of the surviving debt markets division, Barclays Capital, have a tricky time ahead. They must convince their customers that the advantages of dealing with a fully integrated investment bank - advantages which they loudly proclaimed for the 11 years in which Barclays spent £750 million ($1.2 billion) trying to build such a creature - are bunk. Now they must argue that the best type of investment bank to deal with is one focused on its chosen strengths. But the question persists: does Barclays Capital have any strengths beyond sterling bonds and syndicated loans? Even while peddling their new line, those at Barclays Capital must privately question how deep is their own parent's commitment to its new-form investment bank.

No one expects to spend their whole career with one employer, but the ability to move from one job to another with relative ease is taken for granted. But what if your career suffers because you've been made the target of defamatory rumours, or because your company is found to be engaged in disreputable behaviour? A decision in the British House of Lords last month could help, as it now entitles employees to sue for damages called stigma compensation.

There's going to be ferocious competition in the European bond markets post-Emu. Domestic players still have a stranglehold but global houses are making inroads. The best opportunities will be in countries where capital-market deregulation has been slowest, as Gavin Gray reports.

Investing in the Indian capital market is sometimes called the great paper chase. Share certificates come in tiny lots of 50 to 100 shares, clean deliveries are uncertain and the process of transfer can take up to a year at the end of which an investor may discover that his shares are fake, stolen or lost.

The world is facing its worst economic crisis since the 1930s and no-one has a solution to the problems, least of all the IMF.