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 $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"

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

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

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.

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.

Following its takeover of Merrill Lynch, some clarification has started to emerge from Bank of America about its management structure. Chris Allington and Chris Vogel are co-heads of G10 currency trading; Peter Antico is head of Americas rates and local-currency trading; Luke Halestrap is head of EMEA rates and local-currency trading; Chris Hodson is head of global rates electronic trading and market making; Mitch Nadel is head of Japan/Australia rates and currency trading; Nicolas Rabeau and Neh Thaker are co-heads of global rates and currencies exotics trading; Jin Su is head of Asia-Pacific rates and currency trading excluding Japan/Australia; and Frank Rawlins and Behnouche Mostachfi are co-heads of global FX options trading.

"Return to profitability in 2009 is our most important priority". The bank’s chief executive details his vision for a new UBS

On January 12, Bradesco announced that it had promoted Luiz Carlos Trabuco Cappi to chief executive, replacing Marcio Cypriano. Cappi previously headed the bank’s insurance unit. Cypriano will continue as chairman and chief executive of the bank until the annual shareholder meeting in March. After 10 years in the role Cypriano was not able to renew his contract because he had reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 years.

Do end investors, be they feeder funds or funds of hedge funds, or indeed any party offering advice on investing in hedge funds, properly understand the strategies being run? The Madoff case has thrown light on the fact that even the simplest of strategies are clearly not understood by end investors.

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.

"I’m a new kind of thug with a Washington buzz ‘coz dealing debt pays better than dealing drugs." Watch the video here.

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

European Commission digs its heels in over central counterparty.

"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?"

Can this year be any worse for IPOs? 296 is the number of IPOs withdrawn or postponed in 2008; $1.1 billion is the amount raised from the seven IPOs completed in the US during the second half of 2008, with the $145 million offering by Grand Canyon Education being the only US deal to price in the fourth quarter of 2008, when global IPO revenues to bank arrangers slumped 98% compared with the fourth quarter of 2007. Bankers aren’t enthusiastic about IPO prospects for 2009 but at least the annual comparisons are going to be easier.

Sales of distressed real estate assets in Mexico could total more than $10 billion this year. “Mexico is very interesting at the moment,” says a local portfolio manager. “There are four big companies that are struggling that have big real estate portfolios in the country. Now there is an expectation that they will have to sell some of these assets.”

Bill Schwab has been appointed global head of real estate at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia). Schwab joins from JPMorgan, where he was managing director of European real estate finance.

According to Euromoney’s favourite Feng Shui queen, Master Lynn Yap, the coming 12 months will be nothing if not harrowing.

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

"The negative net revenues for FICC in the quarter were due to losses from investments, including corporate debt and private and public equities, and trading in credit products. These results were adversely impacted by unprecedented weakness across the broader credit markets..."

Yes, the share prices of RBS, Lloyds and Barclays have been crushed. The equity markets simply must adjust to banks' reduced status

Structured products are proving neither as safe nor as lucrative as investors were led to expect. However, discomfited clients are prompting those banks that have survived to devise products better suited to difficult conditions. Peter Koh reports.

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”.

Paulson & Co and Hong Kong financial group Sun Hung Kai Financial are to launch a distressed asset investment fund that will focus on financial companies.

GLG Partners has taken on Kaveh Sheibani and Julian Harvey, two of the founders of London-based event-driven fund Pendragon. GLG will become the investment manager of the funds and accounts at Pendragon Capital.

HFR data reveal that $152 billion of capital was withdrawn by hedge fund investors in the fourth quarter of 2008 – the largest withdrawal in a quarter on record. Estimates that hedge fund assets would reach $2.25 trillion by 2010 now seem far too optimistic. HFR estimates that the industry at present has $1.4 trillion in assets. The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index fell by 18.3% for all of 2008, only the second calendar-year decline since 1990.

As the ban on shorting 34 financial stocks lifted in the UK on January 16, shares at first rose but then fell sharply the following week after more bad news from banks. The Financial Services Authority is forcing hedge funds to disclose short sales of financials. Lansdowne Partners admitted to shorting Barclays Bank on one day that the bank lost 25% of its value. There were only six reports of short sales of more than 0.25% of a company. Barclays and RBS, however, saw much of their value wiped out in January as stock was sold off. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission extended its ban on shorting financials that it imposed last September. The ban will remain in place until March 6.

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.

With the current scrutiny on budgets, it is inevitable that IT spending will come under some pressure. According to a recent report from consultancy Celent Communications: "Global information technology spending by financial services institutions will reach $358 billion in 2008." This is a 4.5% increase over 2007, but is, says the firm, "substantially lower than the 6.4% growth achieved in 2007. The financial crisis and economic uncertainty have financial institutions tightening their belts."

Investors who supported those bank capital raisings may be regretting it already.

Premier Foods seeking approval for rights issue and placement.

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.

Key numbers from the equity capital markets in 2008 include $257.4 billion, the value of equity raised by financial sector issuers, accounting for 41% of total ECM volume of $634.4 billion. That’s up from just 11%, the financial sector’s share of new issues in 2007. In 2007, total global ECM volume was $943.7 billion

Downsizing in CLO, CDO, CSO; upscaling mortgage and ABS.

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.

Foreign exchange prime brokers and their exchange-traded product counterparts, the full commission merchants (FCMs), will be fully aware of the complexities involved in modern risk management. To an extent, the uptake of electronic trading has made their task far easier – there are clear audit trails, and trade confirmations are, in most cases, sent out in almost real time.

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 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.

The UK Debt Management Office is canvassing market opinion on the merits of conducting gilt sales via supplementary measures such as mini-tenders, syndication and even direct placement of gilts with end investors. The size of the UK Treasury’s borrowing requirement led the DMO to consult its Gilt Edged Market Makers in a process that ended on January 28. The DMO is seeking to raise the supply of long-dated and index-linked gilts, in particular. In light of the high financing requirement of £143 billion ($194 billion), £147 billion and £135 billion for the next three years from 2009/10, the government’s medium-term strategy is to skew issuance to long-dated maturities. This strategy seeks to take advantage of strong actuarially driven demand at the long end from pension and insurance funds. The last UK syndicated gilt issuance took place in September 2005 when the DMO sold a £1.25 billion 50-year linker. That was a response to the poor auction outcome of a conventional 50-year gilt in May of that year. The results of the consultation will be announced at the time of the UK budget in March.

Goodbye SLS, hello APF.

The CME is expanding its international incentive programmes, which also cover FX products. The programmes will include a simplified fee structure and run until December 31 2010.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

A research report by Gulf Finance House raises the possibility of Kuwait going back to a dollar peg because of extreme volatility in the FX markets and to unfreeze its money markets. "Based on conversations with treasurers, the presence of FX risk premium is effectively imposing a barrier against the flow of funds from cheaper sources in the GCC to Kuwaiti banks," says the report. "Accordingly, dinar interbank rates remain the highest in the region, even after the recent moves of the Central Bank of Kuwait to activate repo facilities of 1% overnight and 3% one-month." Kuwait adopted a basket peg in May 2007 to contain inflationary pressures. The other GCC countries have their currencies pegged to the dollar.

Banco do Brasil has agreed to buy a 50% stake in Banco Votorantim for R$4.2 billion ($1.84 billion), much less than originally expected. Last year there were rumours that Banco do Brasil would buy 49% of Votorantim for R$6.5 billion. The combined entity will have R$553.3 billion in assets, R$275.7 billion in deposits and a credit portfolio of R$232.8 billion.

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.

Despite remaining a largely centrally planned economy, Belarus has not been immune to the fallout from the global credit crunch and the associated macroeconomic slowdown. At the beginning of the year the country was forced to devalue the Belarussian rouble by 20% to BR2,650 to the dollar and raise its key refinancing rate to 14% from 12%.

The Central Bank of Nigeria tightened its foreign exchange management on January 19, moving from a wholesale to a retail Dutch auction system. Applications for international currency must therefore now be deal-specific.

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.

“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.

It is not all bad news at Royal Bank of Scotland. At least its Saudi franchise is improving, which might ultimately fetch the troubled UK bank a higher price if it decides to sell the stake it inherited from ABN Amro.

Dan Condon has joined Standard Chartered as e-channels product manager in Singapore. Condon was previously vice-president, sales, at FXMarketSpace. Meanwhile, sources say Jens Andersen has left his role at Morgan Stanley in New York, where he was head of Americas trading for FXEM. He is believed to be going to Caxton.