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.

Brazil’s Bradesco has raised $500 million in a securitization structured by ABN Amro. The notes were issued in two tranches of $250 million, with the 2007-1 series receiving triple-A ratings and the 2007-2 series rated at A– and Baa1 by S&P and Moody’s respectively. The notes are due in May 2014.

Lorenzo Isla has been appointed head of the structured credit business at BBVA. Based in Spain, Isla will build out a business that will structure, invest in and distribute structured credit risk. Isla worked for Barclays Capital for the past three years where he was head of the structured credit research team. He starts at the end of August and will work from Barcelona and Madrid.

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

The UK’s Prudential and Bank Aljazira, Saudi Arabia’s smallest bank, have signed a memorandum of understanding to promote takaful or Islamic insurance in the kingdom.

The launch of faster, higher-capacity systems by exchanges will make life harder for ATSs.

Latin America’s largest issuers have for a while been competing on pretty much a level playing field with their competitors in fully developed countries. That’s important for Brazilian miner Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, which in the wake of its acquisition of Canada’s Inco is now one of the world’s four largest mining companies, alongside BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, and Anglo American.

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.

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.

Foreign bank interest in Turkey’s fast-growing banking market shows no sign of slowing down, with ING of the Netherlands the latest new entrant into the country’s increasingly cosmopolitan financial services sector. In June, ING signed a contract with the Armed Forces Pension Fund (Oyak), to acquire its subsidiary, Oyak Bank.

Ask any foreign partner involved in a Sino-foreign public-private partnership (PPP) deal and they will tell you that they are far from straightforward to complete. So plans to establish, fund and build China’s first fully digital world-class hospital are not going to be easy.

Oil firms Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips have pulled out of Venezuela following president Hugo Chávez’s latest round of nationalizations, in which he proposed huge increases in state participation in projects run by the two US companies and four others.

Banking analysts are starting to ring alarm bells about Brazil – in recent months there has been a rapid increase in consumer lending by local banks, but this came hand in hand with a large increase in the non-performing loan market.

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.

Corporate treasurers are keeping a close eye on the new regulations that will impact on cash management. The Payment Services Directive is due this autumn – another step forward – yet the timetable for Sepa is still vague. Even identifying the benefits of the changes is a matter of hot debate. Julian Marshall reports.

As covered bond markets continue to thrive worldwide, it appears that the demands of ratings agencies might be becoming a stumbling block.

The launch of further FX indices by Citi and Axa underlines the acceptance of FX as an asset class, which has attractions across the entire investment spectrum.

S&P stance tempers optimism.

New head of European flow credit trading; new head of European investment-grade trading.

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.

Sub-prime-induced volatility was cited as the reason for the withdrawal of a five-year and 10-year euro-denominated transaction by Arcelor. The lead managers – Calyon, Citi, Commerzbank and RBS – sent out a terse statement saying that the borrower would return when stability returned.

Head appointed of a new strategic solutions group.

Great-West Lifeco (GWL) has priced the first Canadian dollar-denominated, tax-deductible hybrid capital transaction.

As the managers of the two Bear Stearns high-grade hedge funds that have attracted such unwelcome publicity over the past month squirm in the spotlight, they must be wondering where they went wrong.

When it’s Euromoney’s awards season, our journalists get to feel what it must be like to be the client of an investment bank for a few weeks at least, as the world’s leading firms wheel out their big guns, and big pitches, to secure one of our prestigious awards.

One of the most puzzling aspects of Asia’s headlong economic growth has been the conspicuous absence of inflation. Despite net foreign exchange inflows of more than $2 trillion since 2000, money supply and credit growth have actually fallen sharply in Asia.

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

The sheer size and influence of sovereign wealth funds is attracting attention – not all of it positive.

Emerging markets remain the primary driver of hedge fund returns for 2007 so far, but all of HFI’s indices continue to outperform the MSCI index in the long term.

As some banks – and a tiny few aspirant young bankers – have realized, there’s good business to be built in the out-of-fashion traditional investment-grade debt capital markets.

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.

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.

Iceland’s Straumur-Burdarás investment bank has extended its international reach to central and eastern Europe with the acquisition of a 50% stake in Wood & Company, the Prague investment banking boutique house, for an undisclosed sum. Reykjavik-headquartered Straumur has an option to increase its holding to 100% no later than early 2011.

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.

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

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.

There’s trouble brewing in the Chinese stock market. But a short, sharp shock could be just what is needed.

"OK, so I screwed up. Even my COO called me up and said: "Great pitch mate, really compelling – shame about the logo on the top of the page"

According to a study by Greenwich Associates, funds of hedge funds are beating high-net-worth individuals and family offices as a source of assets for hedge funds with more than $1 billion in assets under management. HNWIs and family offices contribute 21% of assets, while FoHFs contribute 25%. Pension funds, endowments and foundations directly investing comprise 25%. US institutional allocations to hedge funds are now at more than double the 2001 level, says Greenwich. Some 36% of US institutions invest in hedge funds.

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.

HVB has continued the build-up of its FX business with several senior-level sales appointments, including Mark Sweeting, who it enticed from ABN Amro in London. The bank also hired Toby Angel from JPMorgan, Peter Graham from Pru-Bache and Sue Rasmussen from ANZ.

New service aims to introduce competitive auction for programme trades.

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.

Broker/dealer Louis Capital Markets is recommending auction houses as investment of the month. Sotheby’s, it says, is benefiting from the "soaring fortunes of the ultra-rich". The firm is auctioning works by Monet, Matisse, Warhol and Bacon in July that should – after rises in commission rates earlier this year – significantly increase auctioneer’s earnings.

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

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

Although most analysts failed to predict it, the decision by the National Bank of Poland’s monetary policy committee to increase its benchmark seven-day intervention rate on June 27 by a quarter point to 4.50% had only a marginal impact in the market. The zloty strengthened, as might have been expected, but there was only an extremely modest sell-off in the bond markets, particularly at the long end. Most activity took place at the short end of the yield curve.

In June, investors began to reject low returns on subordinated structures such as PIK toggle notes from riskier issuers. It will be tougher for sponsors to pile more debt on their already leveraged acquisitions. But public company managers aren’t free from the private equity threat.

The switch to lower minimum price increments that came into effect in the US listed equity options market in February is making the market more efficient, according to a report. Earlier this year, the US options industry switched its minimum price increment from $0.05 (nickels) to $0.01 (pennies) in 13 key option classes under a pilot programme mandated by the SEC. The switch to penny pricing is already having a positive impact for users of equity options, according to Aite Group, a US consultancy firm.

The Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong announced in June that it would be "streamlining and simplifying" the licensing process for hedge fund managers with immediate effect. Alexa Lam, the SFC’s executive director of intermediaries and investment products, said: "These initiatives will make the licensing process easier for fund managers and more particularly for overseas hedge fund managers. They are not intended to lower our regulatory requirements because we recognize that these contribute to Hong Kong’s reputation among investors as being a jurisdiction in which appropriate standards are insisted upon among its market participants."

110 the percentage increase in SEC-registered ECM volume from the mining sector year-to-date. Mining companies have raised $6.7 billion via 11 deals so far this year, compared with $3.2 billion via nine deals over the same period in 2006.

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

Big potential seen in mobile communications and financial services.

Hedge fund research group HFR says that in response to enquiries from investors, it is launching an index of hedge funds run by women and minorities called the Diversity Index. Since January 2003, the number of minority and women-owned hedge funds in the HFR database has doubled to more than 100. HFR president Ken Heinz says that requests have come from institutional investors that are required to invest a certain percentage with minority groups. On a historical basis, from January 2003 to May 2007, the index would have produced an annualized net return of 11.26%.

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.

William Cumming, former European head of Citi’s global special situations group (GSSG), is on the move again. He has quit Citi for rival RBS, joining the UK bank’s private equity division in New York. Cumming moved to Citi’s GSSM just over a year ago in April 2006. Before that he had been co-head of the bank’s European securitization business with David Basra since 2004. In his new role Cumming will be working alongside Lindsay McMurray, who rejoined RBS in October 2005 after quitting the bank in April 2004 to join Drawbridge Capital, sister company of Fortress Investments. During her time away from RBS she also spent a few months at Merrill Lynch.