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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.

Okura Hotel,

After the emerging-markets crisis, which countries remain creditworthy?

Credit derivatives will transform the way banks manage their balance sheets. Once banks adopt a true portfolio approach, they will create a fully liquid secondary market in credit risk. Before then, demand for loans, asset swaps and credit derivatives will surge as proprietary traders and hedge funds cut up the credit curve. Mark Parsley reports.

Issuer: Matav

Latest modelling techniques mean rocket scientists at banks can finally get to grips with the age-old problem of credit risk. It means a new lease of life for old portfolio theory and even older maths, as Mark Parsley finds out.

Only the best will survive

In the week that South Korea sought IMF assistance and Yamaichi announced bankruptcy, it was easy to miss the tiny column inches devoted to Jardine Fleming's flagging results. The latest figures show a continued decline in the Hong Kong-based investment bank's profitability. In the first half of 1997 it made a net profit of $29 million, meaning its contribution to parent Robert Fleming's profits had reached an all-time low of 16% of the Scottish bank's earnings. This is down from 28.8% last year, and well short of the target 25% to 33% Fleming wants.

The pack of acquisitive admirers circling around Patria Finance, Prague's much respected investment-banking firm, is growing bigger. Komercni Banka, the Czech Republic's biggest bank, made the first approach. Then came international investment banks, with Fleming and Merrill Lynch reputedly among them.