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Friday 13th is not normally a day when you’d do anything risky. But this December, in London, it was decreed to be ‘Wear your Christmas jumper to work day’.

We like a bit of Christmas spirit as much as the next guy: tequila and bourbon being particular favourites. But the Euromoney office’s latest Christmas card haul left us slightly underwhelmed and, in some cases, just plain confused.

The emergence of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is beginning to pose a real threat to banks’ dominance of the multi-billion global payments business. Banks are still trying to figure out how best to respond. Some are a bit further ahead than others.

Concerns for mid-tier banks as AQR looms; Likely that additional provisioning needed

The Financial Times recently ran a video on its website about the power of hair.

The pace of UK growth is set to almost double in 2014, but the economy is suffering structural imbalances that threaten stability in the medium term.

Someone else who also recently stepped down is Sir Hector Sants, the former head of compliance at Barclays. Sants, a one-time Credit Suisse banker, ran the wholesale division of the British regulatory authority, the Financial Services Authority, from 2004 to 2007. He was then promoted to run the whole organization, which he did until the FSA was dismantled in the middle of 2012.

Anyway, back to Switzerland and the Swiss banks. Things do appear to be stabilizing at UBS. Sergio Ermotti was appointed chief executive in late 2011 and a year later he installed the long-term Merrill Lynch banker Andrea Orcel as head of UBS’s investment bank. UBS underwent an epiphany and scaled its fixed-income division back drastically. The new focus was to be wealth management and corporate finance, which would hopefully flourish untainted by scandals in the fixed-income division. However, in the third quarter of 2013, UBS suffered a setback. The bank announced that it would delay, by at least a year, its aim to reach a 15% group return-on-equity target. This retreat was due to an unexpected demand from the Swiss regulator, Finma, requiring UBS to set aside more capital against "known and unknown litigation".

After a roller-coaster ride this year sparked by fears of Fed tapering, emerging market equities could be calmer in 2014, but will continue to face challenges as investors reappraise the risk-reward expectation.

Germany’s export machine will be hit by a rebalancing of China's economy, but the special relationship between the world’s second- and fourth-largest economies might provide a springboard for the development of more sustainable economic ties.

As the World Cup shapes up to be the main sporting event of 2014, Euromoney columnist Jon Macaskill looks at comparisons between investment banks and football teams for clues to competitive match-ups in the year ahead.

I was interested that the renowned banker James Leigh-Pemberton, who used to head Credit Suisse’s UK operations, left the bank late last year to become chairman designate of UK Financial Investments, the British government unit that manages the taxpayer shareholdings in Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland.