Search results for

True to its reputation for intransigence, North Korea has made no signs of wishing to start repaying or rescheduling its debt. But such defiance hasn't prevented its debt prices rising by 15% on long-shot speculation that North and South Korea could reunite and as a result of generally positive sentiments on emerging markets.

Over the past three months Euromoney editor Garry Evans interviewed Ospel for a total of five hours, twice in Ospel's office in Basel and once last month, the day after the bank announced its 1996 results, by video link-up between London and Basel. The full 15,000-word text follows.

"10,000 by 2000!" That's the latest prediction for the millennium opening on the Dow Jones Industrial Average from Ed Yardeni, chief economist at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell (DMG). Yardeni who might be described as the most optimistic man in the world will surely see his prediction tested now that US interest rates have started to rise. If he is proved right, investors worldwide will rejoice except perhaps those in the UK.

The Ospel interview

When the story broke it caused more excitement than the time when everyone was asking, "who shot Roger Rabbit?" Suddenly every banker from Frankfurt to Hong Kong wanted to know, "who at Dresdner Bank shot Simon Robertson?"

In the first two months of 1997 an economic state of emergency was announced in Colombia and the currency tumbled. Then, barely a week after the emergency was over, a blow-out $1 billion global bond was issued that catapulted the country out of the second division of emerging markets into the ranks of investment-grade borrowers.

India's feeble coalition government is taking bold steps to reform its debt market. Just four months after opening up domestic corporate debt to foreign investors, it has let them into the government bond market.

Hoping to increase the transparency and execution quality of a marketplace long shrouded in controversy and scandal, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) implemented several new rules in the over-the-counter equity market known as Nasdaq. Although the changes have been in the works for several years, last year's Justice Department price-fixing case against 24 major Nasdaq market makers pushed the SEC to act this January. Apparently unrepentant about the disrepute surrounding their market, leading firms are already grumbling about the new rules.

For many cynics in the securities industry, the upcoming introduction of the euro had only one real benefit. The enormous cost of converting systems to the new single European currency could be used as timely camouflage to correct the firm's information technology cock-ups of the past.

You won't see these options being traded on the floor at Liffe, but Shahram Nikpour at Bossard Consultants thinks that options on information technology firms are already hot property.

In his 18 months running the World Bank, James Wolfensohn has earned a reputation as something of a straight talker. Feeling the heat is Chilean electric utility Endesa. Wolfensohn has accused it of failing to fulfil environmental obligations that were part of an IFC loan for a hydroelectric plant on the Bio Bio river, 400 kilometres south of Santiago.