Kuwait's central bank has announced new credit facilities for local companies.

The Private Banking and Wealth Management Survey 2009 received 1643 valid votes (1244 'part B' votes, 399 'part A' votes), representing $11.8 trillion of Assets under Management.

The UK Treasury’s latest bank bail-out plan will fail unless it works out what bad assets are worth.

UBS’s chief executive was the first global bank head to tackle the impact of the credit crunch. His actions may have saved the bank. Much remains to be done. The future of the firm’s investment bank is in doubt. And so will Rohner’s own position be, if he doesn’t quickly return the bank to profit and shut the door on outflows in its wealth management franchise. Clive Horwood reports

The resolution of one Latin America banking crisis in the early 1980s could provide lessons for today’s policymakers.

Beleaguered European corporates can only dream of such quick and easy access to equity capital.

"The $1.2 million reported in the press was for the renovation of my office, two conference rooms and a reception area. The expenses were incurred over a year ago in a very different environment"

The scale of the loss at RBS plus the talk of full nationalization and the circumstances at Merrill Lynch diverted attention from Deutsche Bank. But its losses are perhaps the most disheartening of the three.

Claims of special access to the best managers and extraordinary due-diligence skills are not rooted in reality.

“It’s the right time to go for me. I was going to go a year ago. It’s been 25 years and I’m 50 years old. Time for new blood to fight the new fight!” says Paul Hearn on announcing his retirement from BNP Paribas in January.

In a high-profile move, Grigory Marchenko has been appointed as chairman of the National Bank of Kazakhstan (NBK) for the second time, replacing his successor, Anvar Saidenov.

Chile is on track to weather the financial crisis and avoid a recession. “Chile managed the boom years incredibly well and now they have the funds to help smooth the financial cycles and work through this crisis. We have a pretty favourable outlook on Chile for 2009,” says Casey Reckman, associate director in Fitch’s Latin American sovereign group.

The fallen of Wall Street have a new way to lift their spirits. Apparently, New York bankers’ latest craze is hypnotism.

Consolidation among investment banks has had a big impact on the equity capital markets league table results in 2008 and will do so again in 2009.

Latin American sovereigns are on track to meet their 2009 financing needs after an impressive start to the year, according to senior debt bankers. Barclays Capital reckons that 34% of this year’s estimated total of $19 billion of emerging market sovereign issuance has already been successfully placed despite fears that the US and Europe would crowd them out. Latin American corporates, in contrast, are facing more difficult and expensive financing.

News that China experienced a severe foreign exchange outflow in the fourth quarter of 2008 came as a major surprise to most analysts and left them searching explanations. According to an initial report written by Stephen Green, Standard Chartered’s head of research for China, the unexplained outflows could have been as much as $240 billion, a figure he described as “a very big, very scary number”.

Cost savings accelerate move towards independent administrators.

The UK Treasury is understood to be considering the establishment of a conduit-style fund that would source investment directly from institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies to fund its infrastructure investment programme. The UK government would own the conduit and take the first-loss risk in the vehicle. Management of the conduit would be outsourced to a third party – insiders suggest that one of the monoline guarantors is being considered. The conduit could be launched in the next three to six months.

In the second part of Euromoney’s foreign exchange debate, which took place in late 2008, industry experts consider the future for the business. There is still cause for optimism, although inflation remains a big unknown and there are real fears of governments’ ability to sustain debt levels.

This year is not set to be one of economic recovery – the financial assets that are cheap are cheap for a very good reason, and it’s not a propitious one.

Academics at the University of Portsmouth are undertaking an unconventional study into new business methods, commissioned by transition consultants Advanced Workplace Associates (AWA).

Credit Suisse has announced the formation of a new group in its EMEA global markets solutions business (GMSB) designed to address what co-head of global investment banking Jim Amine describes as a “unique opportunity” presented by the current debt market dislocation.

According to analysts at JPMorgan, there is little certainty among all the doom, gloom and despondency in the financial markets. But although few people can confidently predict the outcome of the global financial crisis, JPMorgan believes it can be relatively sure that 2009 will be a year of less leverage and more regulation.

Retail FX provider FXCM has launched a new platform, Active Trader, which it says is aimed at the higher end of the market. The platform has greater depth of book transparency and, unlike most other retail offerings, charges commission, determined by volumes, to trade. FXCM says this enables it to pass on tighter spreads from its liquidity providers. Accounts will require minimum deposits of $25,000 or a history of active trading.

VTB, Russia’s second-biggest bank, announced worse-than-expected results for the third quarter after making a loss of $369 million following the doubling of its provisioning levels. Analysts at Nomura reckon that the biggest challenge facing VTB is that the equity capital of the bank declined by $1.5 billion in the third quarter alone. The bank’s chief financial officer has said that it needs to raise tier 1 capital and is hopeful that its minority shareholders will come to the rescue. In the third quarter, the bank’s capital adequacy ratio fell to 14% from 15.8%, although it’s still well above the Russian minimum level of 10%. The bank’s tier 1 ratio dropped to 12.7% from 14.4% in the second quarter.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is continuing its efforts to put an end to some of the sharper practices that have plagued the country’s retail foreign exchange market. On January 15, the regulator announced it had charged James Ossie of Atlanta, Georgia, and his company, CRE Capital Corporation (CRE) of Alpharetta, Georgia, with operating a Ponzi scheme. The CFTC claims that the scam sucked in more than 100 apparent clients and involved about $25 million. Neither Ossie nor CRE had ever been registered with the CFTC.

The decision of the Federal Reserve to turn on the printing presses will result in a re-run of the 1970s. For investors the best safe havens are hard assets, including gold – Keynes’ “barbarous relic”, writes Lincoln Rathnam.

The huge fraud underlines the crucial role of hedge fund administrators and independent prime brokers. An SEC that’s more au fait with hedge funds would also help. Neil Wilson reports.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s requirement to increase the amount of net adjusted capital needed to operate in the retail FX market to $15 million on January 17 has led ODL Securities to decide it is no longer worth operating in the US. Sources close to ODL say that having pulled out from the west, it will now refocus on the east.

"I’ve no interest in Davos. I don’t know how they keep the snow from melting with all the hot air. What has Davos ever achieved except perpetuating the belief among participants that they are so very special?"