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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.

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.

Issuer: Telecom Italia

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.

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.

The Kalff interview

The Kalff interview

When the Republica Oriental del Uruguay sold a 10-year bond on the international debt markets in September 1996, officials at the Banco Central were pleased to note that the 160 basis point spread was tighter than some recent offerings from investment grade-rated sovereigns, strength-ening their belief that Uruguay was ready for an upgrade.

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?