Its pivotal role in the most important transactions of a hectic year in M&A makes Goldman Sachs the outstanding player in the most competitive market of all.

In the July 2007 edition of Euromoney, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis gave a rare in-depth interview. Lewis said: "We are not believers in the build it and they will come mantra. We need to look our shareholders in the eye". "In time, we want to be one of the top five investment banks in the world". More than 18 months ago Euromoney said: "Bank of America is at a tipping point. Ken Lewis is about to face his biggest challenge yet." Little did we know how great the challenge would be. Re-read the story here

John Mack has the job he always wanted. One of Wall Street’s leading firms has the leader it desperately needed. Morgan Stanley is now the investment bank with momentum. Mack and his senior management tell Clive Horwood how they revived the firm’s fortunes.

Find out which institutions have excelled this year in providing high-quality products and services across all areas of commercial and investment banking.

Pravin Mouli has left his position as head of Morgan Stanley’s Latin American derivatives trading business to run Latin America trading with Javier Timerman at Bear Stearns’ New York office. Meanwhile Juan Martin, ABN Amro’s head of loan syndication, has left the Dutch bank for a similar role at Deutsche Bank. And Sandy Flockhart, president and group managing director for Latin America and the Caribbean at HSBC, is moving to Hong Kong to become the bank’s Asia CEO.

Telefónica has successfully closed the largest multi-tranche Czech koruna bond issue by a foreign corporate. The main purpose of the transaction was to extend the company’s investor base to Czech investors – a move the Spanish telephone company has been interested in since its arrival in the Czech Republic after it acquired a majority stake in the country’s main telecom operator, Cesky Telecom, in mid-2005.

A basket approach to pricing currencies could help curb Gulf inflation.

Competition for real estate expertise in Europe heats up.

S&P this June launched the new S&P Pan Asia Shariah Index, a new addition to its Global Shariah Index Series.

Private financing and the crossover space between debt and equity is an increasingly attractive area of business for investment banks. Already a player in the sector, Deutsche Bank is making a renewed push for dominance in Asia with a significant hiring programme.

Commodities offer a means of diversifying investment portfolios, and of bringing down volatility. They can also offer good returns to the savvy investor. But the markets still have some way to go in terms of increasing sophistication.

June marks the beginning of the hurricane season in the Caribbean, and every year there’s a chance that any given island will suffer devastating losses to infrastructure, property and life.

The UK’s Financial Services Authority has granted CME the status of a recognized overseas clearing house. This will allow it to clear products that are not traded on the centralized markets run by the CME in the US, including currency forwards.

Jack Jeffery, chief executive of electronic broking at Icap, quit the broker almost a year to the day after its purchase of EBS. Jeffery, who was parachuted into EBS from Citi in February 2002, had overseen EBS’s integration into Icap, which moved swiftly to replace him, announcing that market veteran John Nixon had assumed the role.

Numbers of specialists up 63%, to over 300 since Sept ‘05.

Standard & Poor’s has launched the S&P BRIC Shariah Index, aiming to give it a bigger share of the fast-growing Islamic finance market. The new index is designed to cover the largest and most liquid stocks in Brazil, Russia, India and China that meet Shariah law investment criteria and that trade on developed market exchanges – the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the London Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. Standard & Poor’s already offers Shariah-compliant versions of its most widely used global indices – the S&P 500, the S&P Europe 350 and the S&P Japan 500, as well as the S&P GCC Middle East Shariah Index Series. "The S&P BRIC Shariah Index feeds into the already powerful line-up of Islamic indices launched over the past six months by Standard & Poor’s," says Alka Banerjee, vice-president of Standard & Poor’s Index Services. "Each of the constituents within the S&P BRIC Shariah Index is liquid and completely hedgeable. As a result, we are already seeing clients create mutual funds and structured products based upon the index." To be eligible for inclusion in the S&P BRIC Shariah Index, companies must first be constituents of the S&P/IFCI Index for Brazil, Russia, India and China. Constituents are then screened for Shariah compliance based on proprietary sector and financial ratios. Only those stocks deemed Shariah-compliant are retained for the final universe of the index. All S&P Shariah indices are screened by Ratings Intelligence Partners, a Kuwait consulting company.

All the global players have a presence in Australia, which is the fourth-largest asset management market in the world. Chris Wright looks at their strategies.

In a move that demonstrates the broadening appeal of Russian assets, HSBC Investments has launched the first pure Russian equity fund for Japanese investors, raising more than $150 million since launching a marketing campaign at the end of March.

The world economy is set to keep growing fast for the next few months. But this will take an inevitable toll on the cost of capital, which is already rising.

"My only expectation is that I am going to continue to work my ass off"

ANZ combined a number of features on its latest tier-1 deal that allowed it to cut the premium an issuer normally pays to access institutional investors without a coupon step-up at the call date. The £450 million ($898 million) tier-1 perpetual paper was ANZ’s first sterling capital security.

The buzz surrounding the launch of the new Q-WIXX CDS trading platform suggests that it is one of the most eagerly awaited, and supported, product launches in years.

Optimism that the launch of collateralized foreign exchange obligations (CFXO) would attract a new range of participants to the market (see Structured products: CFXOs bring in new investors, Euromoney June 2007) now looks well founded. Merrill Lynch says that it attracted more than €1 billion ($1.34 billion) for its recently launched CFXO, which is managed by Crédit Agricole Asset Management. "The deal went much better than we even expected," says Atanas Bostandjiev, managing director and head of structured rates and FX marketing, EMEA, at Merrill. "The roadshow in Europe alone raised the global target. Compared with CDOs that have been launched on non-traditional assets, this has been excellent."

A new index might increase both liquidity and volatility.

As margin lenders to the two struggling Bear Stearns hedge funds High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Master Fund and High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Master Fund scrambled to avert losses in late June, another vehicle with links to the funds was facing up to problems of its own. Everquest Financial, which was recently formed by Bear Stearns (and had filed a registration with the SEC on May 9 to list), is one of a raft of new listed permanent capital vehicles that have been investing in the equity and first-loss parts of structured credit investments and been hailed as a vital new source of liquidity in this market.

The storm clouds that were once on the horizon are now overhead.

Who is there to save the day when hedge funds have a blow-up? Why, it’s other hedge funds, which can make a profit clearing up the mess.

Wall Street investment bankers were agog at the news. Could it really be that Jimmy Quigley, debt capital markets legend and icon of Merrill Lynch’s dominance of the primary bond markets in the 1990s, had become an accountant?

As part of Deutsche Bank’s recent expansion initiatives for its overall prime brokerage business, the firm has launched a hedge fund consultancy.

Neil Wilson, editorial director at HedgeFund Intelligence, argues that there is little substance to the conspiracy theories that dog private equity.