Regarding Euromoney's March 2006 cover story: “Inside Argentina’s financial crisis” written by Guillermo Nielsen, Argentina’s former finance secretary.

State Bank of India has decided to enter India’s rapidly growing market for securitized assets.

The capital markets are something of an open goal for debt issuers at the moment – spreads are tight, and investors want to put their money to work.

Will US issuers start to look at Europe’s institutional markets?

BNP Paribas has topped the investment grade section of the Euromoney credit research poll for the past three years but this success has not stood in the way of a shift to a new research model.

Investors will have to wait for deals to burn out before prepayments in European CMBS transactions begin to ease.

The central Asian republic may still be developing suitable funding channels, but a pick-up in deals is expected, given an economy that continues to grow and an appropriate legal framework. Patrick Gill reports.

ITG and Merrill Lynch have joined forces in a joint venture called “Block Alert, powered by Posit” that will create a global block order crossing service.

ResCap was able to pay back its domestic debt owed to GMAC ahead of market expectations following a $3.5 billion multi-tranche transaction ($1 billion of three-year sub, and $2.5 billion of senior – split into $1.75 billion of seven-year and $750 million of three-year).

Central Asia, a stronghold for dictators, poverty and corruption, doesn’t at first glance seem to offer fertile ground for high investment returns. But this is precisely what some of the region’s more intrepid investors hope to find and profit from. Kathryn Wells spends a week on the road with two hedge fund managers, on the lookout for opportunities on this new frontier.

Goldman Sachs has reshuffled its Latin American investment banking team by naming Eduardo Centola and Martin Werner as co-heads.

A compulsory minimum free float for banks listing in Russia is illogical, hard to police and might not be in investors’ best interests.

Saudi Arabia’s stock market regulator, the Capital Markets Authority, is in an invidious position. At the start of the year CMA officials tried in vain to warn naive retail investors about the dangers of piling into the under-researched, thinly traded speculative stocks that comprise nearly a quarter of the country’s public companies. They were ignored: dismissed as interfering, risk-averse bureaucrats. The market, driven by rising corporate profitability resulting from the high oil price, rose to absurd levels.

Bankers reckon convertible bonds will be a product to watch in the developing world.

Competitors gloating over the firm’s current predicament are likely to be sorely disappointed.

Until discrepancies between index auction prices and single-name CDS recovery rates can be ironed out, investors should sell recovery basis risk.

Proponents of European high yield think covenants for issuers should be relaxed if the market is to survive.

The removal of restrictions on trans-national M&A are fundamental to EU principles. Turkey is setting an example.

Latin America is no stranger to banking crises. Every so often a banking system will implode, and depositors will lose all or some of their money.

Euromoney’s investigation into the global FX market in 2006 – seven years before the fixing controversy - revealed the scale of the practice of banks’ pre-empting, or front-running, clients' FX orders.

In this edition, don't miss: Abigail's opinion of Lehman's Board of Directors and of Jeremy Isaacs' realm; her advice to Bank of America on investment banking; the details of HSBC's Studzinski's glam 50th birthday party; and hats off to Rainer Stephan, chairman of Barclays in Germany.

After a few years of dormancy, convertible bond issuance in emerging Europe and the Middle East is picking up again. A few innovative and highly structured deals have priced this year and bankers are confident of more transactions. Sudip Roy reports on factors driving the activity and the types of investors involved.

It´s the new Big Bang in equity trading. As research and execution are unbundled, and as clients increasingly access markets directly, brokers need to find new ways to keep their institutional clients. Algorithmic trading is one way. It cuts execution costs, adds alpha and gives the creative brokers – those able to design flexible, customized algorithms – a new way to keep in the execution business, for now.

Hybrid structured products – cross-asset-class investments – are finally starting to make a significant impact with investors. Banks report increasing demand from those looking to trade several market views via a single instrument to instantly reap the benefits of portfolio diversification. But with increasing sales come new challenges, such as the pricing of correlation. How are hybrid structured product makers faring?

The authorities of Saudi Arabia have used the stock market to redistribute wealth, but in doing so they helped inflate a bubble. The inevitable crash has aroused some discontent. Rather then rushing to bail the market out, policymakers should use the sell-off as a spur to force out the manipulators and build a sounder infrastructure by forging ahead with privatization, licensing new investment banks and brokers and fostering institutional asset management. The pain of the sell-off will eventually pass, because Saudi Arabia is booming.

Australian regulator’s charges cast doubt on legitimacy of prop trading.

Lehman Brothers has incorporated its European structured finance syndicate and the short-term credit business into its wider syndicate platform. Lorenzo Frontini, European head of syndicate, now has Brett Olson, Edward Rose and Yekaterina Antropova, who are responsible for structured finance, reporting to him. Jon Ford, who runs short-term credit reports to Frontini geographically and Paul Feidelson, global head of short term credit.

Vietnam’s first flirtation with western fund management ended in an embarrassing exit for all but the die-hard few. Now that money is queuing to get in again, those who stuck it out through the downturn advise caution. Chris Leahy reports.

IMF responds to Nielsen accusations

It’s Vietnam, but not as we’ve known it. The country’s financial markets have promised much in the past and delivered little but disappointment. Reforms are now for real and initially most apparent in the banks. Significant opportunities are there for the taking. Chris Leahy reports.