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With anywhere between $2 billion and $5 billion of exposure to the 58 finance and securities companies recently suspended by the Thai government, foreign creditors are losing their chai yen(cool heart) and turning to the law courts to get their money back.

On the basis of his CV, Charles Frank appears to have been planning to join a multilateral organization all his career. He has strong academic credentials, experience in government as well as an impressive track record in banking and project finance.

Two years and that's your lot. At least that's the usual practice for heads of borrowing at Korea Development Bank (KDB). So Duck-Soo Kim's departure after three and half years in the job was  if anything  a bit overdue. The new man is Young-Jin Lee.

On October 3, Barclays chief executive Martin Taylor announced he was selling the equities and corporate finance divisions of his investment bank BZW. Only five weeks earlier he'd hired a high-profile banker to head BZW France. And only a year ago Taylor lured Bill Harrison from Robert Fleming to revamp the very divisions he's now put on the block. What went wrong? And what does it say about British banking's most celebrated chief executive? By Antony Currie.

Private equity, venture capital or merchant banking - whatever you call it - is a hot area that banks and investors are piling into in Europe, importing US-style aggression and leverage techniques. It's not quite the fear and greed of the 1980s, but a market correction could shake some of the less prudent off their perch. Peter Lee reports.

To say that Chip Kruger is not well known in London is an understatement. Few UK bank analysts have met him or know much about him except that he used to co-run Greenwich Capital Markets, a successful bond-trading business in Connecticut, that was acquired by NatWest.

Just last spring, Raiffeisen Zentralbank, or RZB, had virtually no profile in the capital-markets industry of eastern Europe; the bank was known mainly in its domestic market, Austria, where it is a high-street bank with 2,500 branches. Last year the London office of RZB took up only a few floors of a non-descript building on a tiny side street. But over the past few months, the bank has shaken off its sleepy origins and has started actively poaching staff from larger firms and aggressively expanding into sales, trading, research and, more recently, investment banking.

By mid-September, US companies had announced plans to buy back about $114 billion of their own shares, about two-thirds the amount announced in all of 1996, and one and a half times 1994's total, according to Securities Data. But while such buy-backs have been viewed as a bullish signal for the past few years, they are now increasingly viewed as little more than elaborate sleight of hand designed to con investors. If they've artificially boosted the stock market, as many now suggest, might the enormous overhang they are creating also trigger its fall?

Systematic traders and risk managers rely on tons of historical data to help predict probable gains and losses. So how will they predict the behaviour of the euro during its first few trading days, weeks, months? By David Shirreff.

Arguments over how to price a deal will never go away, even for frequent borrowers. Most have 15 or more investment banks chasing the mandates, offering the issuer all sorts of advice and inducements. A treasurer who chooses an aggressively priced deal might save his institution a few thousand dollars over 10 years and make himself look good to his bosses, but if it's too aggressive and investors don't buy it, could this harm his future issues? And if the deal is too generous, why should investors bother to buy paper issued later that might be more accurately priced?

I've just returned from Germany, visiting the great in government, bureaucracy, Bundesbank and the European Monetary Institute. I'm convinced the Bundesbank will raise interest rates by 25 basis points before the year-end and by around 200bp by the end of 1998.

For all the talk of designing exotic derivatives for hedge funds, the most useful service a bank can provide is often good old-fashioned credit. Even so hedge funds are prompting banks to reorganize since their demands straddle many departments. The funds' importance as customers is starting to outstrip that of institutional investors, and the banks are dancing to their tune. Andy Webb reports.