Euromoney August 2000
A piece of Hans Dalborg’s Nordic jigsaw is missing: the Norwegian one. His bid for Norway’s Christiania Bank is taking time to process. But MeritaNordbanken, the region’s biggest bank, is on a roll. It already has 9 million customers and 1.5 million of them are online. No wonder the big banks down south are eyeing his operation greedily.
Euromoney August 2000
While US asset managers continue to be seen as the world’s biggest players, European institutions are catching up. Intersec Research Corporation’s latest ranking of the top 250 non-US asset managers shows who is growing fastest
Euromoney August 2000
More and more emerging countries are developing asset-backed securities markets as a way to improve on inefficient bank financial intermediation. The aim is to stimulate domestic investment, as well as to attract international investors that have long bought emerging-market issues backed by hard-currency receivables. With a little help from the IFC, mortgage securitization schemes are now running in Argentina and South Africa. The IFC has also helped develop more complex lease securitizations in Korea and Turkey. If securitization markets are to grow as big as those in Europe and the US, radical changes are needed in bankruptcy laws, regulation and standards of disclosure. James Smalhout reports
Euromoney August 2000
Euromoney August 2000
As investors load up on European high-yield bonds they are faced with problems in every direction. Credit portfolio models are unreliable because of the lack of data on everything from default rates, rating downgrades, recovery rates and correlation between assets. Only when European corporates have been through a severe crisis will the required performance data be available. Anja Helk reports
Euromoney August 2000
Euromoney takes a look at three publicly available models: PortfolioManager, CreditMetrics, and CreditRisk+.
Euromoney August 2000
The guaranteed bonus, like the jumbo shrimp and military intelligence, is a bit of a contradiction in terms. A bonus implies something given as a reward for exceptional performance. Guaranteeing it makes it more of a right, like a normal salary. But the business appeal of this catchy oxymoron is in high vogue on Wall Street as firms respond to the lure of dot coms. In years’ past only a few firms would be paying guaranteed bonuses, often during a rapid build-up and to compensate new hires for the risk of joining from established firms. Such guaranteed pay-outs were regarded as a sign of weakness. Now they have become commonplace. James Smalhout reports
Euromoney August 2000
By adding strategic advisory and outsourcing capabilities to their core services, banks are dressing up traditional cash management and treasury offerings as ‘e-business solutions’. Are these pioneering moves into the new economy enough to win in a web-enabled world? Rick Butler reports
Euromoney August 2000
Big rises for Asian banks reflect not only their gradual recovery from crisis but the scale of the hammering they took a few years back. Many are still regarded by analysts as weak though in the longer run their position could be stronger than those banks which have not yet been forced to reform. This year’s top 250 emerging market banks, prepared by Moody’s Investor Services, shows the considerable changes that are taking place in the sector. Keri Geiger reports
Euromoney August 2000
The financial playing field in Japan is as loaded against the foreigner as baseball is there. That’s the message sent out by recent disciplinary actions against foreign securities houses. But the dynamics are more complex. The new Financial Supervisory Authority needs to show who’s boss. And historically there have been more constraints on Japanese than foreign firms. Kevin Rafferty reports
Euromoney August 2000
The first major online retailer to go from dot com to dot gone, sports clothes site Boo.com blunted the eagerness of venture capitalists and internet incubators to back virtually any start-up that crossed their paths. European private-equity investors remain in the race to spot and back the most promising new entrants in the dot com arena, but they are treading much more carefully. Many have given up on business-to-consumer start-ups entirely and only back business-to-business ventures. Other specialist investors are searching for opportunities in internet infrastructure and wireless technology. Crafty internet entrepreneurs are redrawing business plans to fall in with the latest investment enthusiasms. Plenty still dream of making internet fortunes, but most recognize the need to embrace old-economy business disciplines. Britt Tunick reports
Euromoney August 2000
Even the whiff of a country’s likely exit from eurozone membership could cause a run on that country’s banks and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is the logical conclusion of an exercise that few within the eurozone, or even outside it, dare to rehearse. It could destroy the euroland banking system. But the European Commission’s own president, Romano Prodi, has twice raised the taboo subject of a euro exit. The intellectual challenge of predicting how things would work out won’t go away. Brian Kettell takes us through a hypothetical French exit.