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Only the best will survive

When the world started to melt

Which are Asia's strongest companies? With the region's corporates facing difficult market conditions, declining stock prices and a credit squeeze, the difference between Asia's many underperformers and its increasingly global star players is likely to grow. Asia's leading analysts gave their views of the best companies by sector and region in Euromoney's annual survey. The results contain a few surprises. In the Indian sub-continent - included this year for the first time - Pakistan's companies are rated higher than their counterparts in India. Research by Rebecca Dobson

Trade unions and opposition parties aren't happy, but Greece's harsh budget may just put the country on course to join the European single currency. Yet, as Robert Minto reports, recent currency volatility and stock-market woes suggest the road ahead may be long and hard

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%.

Issuer: Eesti Uhispank (Union Bank of Estonia)

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.

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.

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.