Which US investment bank is back in the top 10? Which Danish bank breaks into the top 25 for the first time? What’s the best multi-bank platform – FXall or Currenex? And who are the leading local banks in emerging market FX? Here are the views of over 8,000 end-users who transacted over $120 trillion in the past 12 months.

The range of structured credit products on offer to investors has grown as they seek to increase returns in a low-yield environment. The next stage, led by CPDOs, is to create more spread-based, rated products that incorporate default and market risk.

The Argentine government has advised Ecuador not to follow its example and default on its debt.

Whatever the conclusion of the bid war for ABN Amro, it will put the Dutch bank’s prize Brazilian asset, Banco Real, into the ring.

Rapid growth of Caja Madrid’s mortgage book last year prompted the Spanish savings bank to issue its first RMBS transaction. But as executive managing director and head of capital markets Carlos Stilianopoulos explains, the bank has its sights firmly set on the CLO market in 2007. Louise Bowman reports.

Macro fund on losing streak; incentive fees down 88% in February quarter.

Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB) came to the market in January with a $350 million Eurobond and became the first domestic borrower from Nigeria to access the international markets. Since then, two other banks, First Bank of Nigeria (FBN) and First City Monument Bank (FCMB), have also completed international deals.

In 20 years, RZB has gone from being an Austrian also-ran to a central and eastern European market leader. Much of its success is attributable to the vision of Raiffeisen International’s CEO, Herbert Stepic. No wonder he is known to the Austrian masses as ‘Der Cash-Man’. Guy Norton looks at RZB’s ambitious plans for further expansion in the region, and Sudip Roy finds out what keeps the fire burning in Stepic’s belly.

Euromoney has incorporated its annual credit research poll into a new fixed income research survey. The intention has been to give those banks that no longer follow the traditional fundamental sell-side credit research model a chance to be nominated by their clients.

General Atlantic, a global private equity firm, has taken a stake in the Global Electronic Trading Company. Bill Ford, GA’s chief executive, and Rene Kern, its managing director, will join Getco’s board. GA has been steadily investing in the financial services sector. It has taken stakes in what it describes as innovative, technology-driven companies, including Saxo Bank.

Czech power provider CEZ has been voted central and Eastern Europe’s best-managed company for the second year running. Rising energy prices are helping the firm to record strong profits, but why are analysts so impressed by the firm’s management? Lawrence White reports.

Buying an oil-producing company in Kazakhstan is by no means a straightforward process, as Citic’s acquisition of Nations Energy makes clear. Nor is the Chinese company’s future in the country at all clearly signposted. Elliot Wilson reports.

The Irish bank is bringing unconventional assets into the burgeoning covered bond market.

A flurry of bond deals should not disguise the fact that aggressive loans and PIKs have squeezed both high yield and mezzanine finance.

Niall Cameron, who left ABN Amro as head of traded markets in February this year, has joined the Markit Group.

The International Securities Exchange, which pioneered electronic equity option trading in the US, has listed contracts on four currency pairs: US dollar/euro, US dollar/sterling, US dollar/yen and US dollar/Canadian dollar. Timber Hill will serve as the primary market maker, and Citigroup Derivatives Markets, Lehman Brothers and Optiver US will act as competitive market makers. The contracts are very much aimed at the US retail sector.

Ukrainian politicians and bankers are considering allowing the dollar-pegged hryvna to become a managed floating currency. A first reading of a draft law in the country’s parliament, the Rada, has led to expectations that such a change could be made within 12 months.

Icap has widened the distribution of its electronic forward foreign exchange platform after what it says is its successful take-up in Europe. The company says the platform will build on the success of EBS, the spot platform it bought from its mainly bank owners in 2006.

European credit strategist Gary Jenkins has joined Synapse Investment Management as a partner and portfolio manager in the credit strategy team. Gary was previously a managing director and head of fundamental credit strategy at Deutsche Bank, and before that was a managing director and head of credit research at Barclays Capital.

"It was one of those deals that really worked. It caught the market, it caught the moment and it caught the imagination" -Tim Skeet, Merrill Lynch

Dominion Bond Rating Service is now an eligible External Credit Assessment Institution with 11 EU countries. It is part of a long drive by the Canadian-headquartered rating agency to break into the industry oligopoly.

The opening up of the Chinese FX market has continued with the unveiling of a new trading platform by the China Foreign Exchange Trade System. The platform, which uses Reuters’ electronic trading technology, initially went live on March 12 for currencies other than the yuan before being expanded to allow CFETS member banks to trade the yuan against five other currencies in early April.

Doubts have surfaced about the feasibility of monetary union after a tense meeting of central bankers.

FXMarketSpace, the 50/50 joint venture owned by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Reuters, officially went live as planned at the end of the first quarter.

Head of prime brokerage Hannah Goodwin talks about expansion of the bank’s services to Singapore.

"Help me.... I’m cold... I don’t know where I am... there are bugs crawling all over me..."

Three cheers to Raiffeisen International.

But Tate & Lyle puts itself on the Pink Sheets.

"Oh shit!"

One man, one vision might be a line from a naff Queen song but it neatly encapsulates the role Herbert Stepic has played in building Raiffeisen International into one of the strongest banking franchises in Europe.

The present run of stock market buoyancy cannot be sustained. And that’s not just because credit is set to contract – so, too, are corporate profits.

"And what drives me? I want to create a huge empire. That is what drives me. And as long as God is willing and gives me strength and I am healthy, I will do that"

Boards spend more time discussing alternative investments.

Is Poland the new Russia? Not in economic superpower terms, but in riding roughshod over the wishes of foreign investors?

Chinese regulators now want the largest state-owned firms to list at home, leaving smaller private companies to trade in Hong Kong. But these might be the best Chinese companies and losing them may be a big mistake.

Slackening underwriting standards in loans that back a burgeoning CDO market? It all sounds horribly familiar.

Can you afford to invest in Cuba’s London Club NPLs and maybe wait 20 years for a restructuring? Perhaps not, but there are other potential winning bets on the wilder shores of the emerging markets.

The ultimate local market, real estate is also open to being globalized as an asset class. Great strides have been made in doing this and there’s more to come.

Is a high level of consolidation in the FX market sustainable? And what of the hundreds of banks that fall outside the bulge bracket?

More efficiency in clearing will help increase the importance of Europe’s equity markets.

The usual post-bonus round of recruitment has generated a typical flurry of activity in Asia’s investment banking community. The one area that has been notably active is the debt capital markets business as banks reposition their businesses to reflect the exceptionally strong market conditions of 2006 and the start of this year.

Joint venture with local player and a multi-strategy approach.

Small and mid-sized companies have outperformed larger ones for the past six years and their winning streak has so far continued into this year. While the S&P 500 has risen 2.2% year to date, the S&P 400 mid-cap index has shot up 7.7% and the small-cap S&P 600 by 4.7%.

As of June 1, Rupert Allan, president of Tremont Capital, will be taking on the role of CEO.

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Société Générale has acquired a 100% stake in Banco Cacique, a Brazilian retail firm specializing in consumer credit with 1,800 employees and about 600,000 active clients. A spokeswoman for SG told Euromoney that the move was not indicative of any plan to rush into Brazil but is rather the targeting of a specific market where strong growth is expected.

Eurex is clearly very proud of its new exchange-listed credit index futures. To celebrate the launch, the international derivatives exchange threw a party at the London Aquarium in Westminster, giving it the full James Bond treatment.

International banks continue to flock to Turkey, where the lure of a 70 million-plus population that is becoming increasingly bankable presents an almost irresistible attraction. Among the latest entrants to the Turkish banking market is Bank TuranAlem, Kazakhstan’s number two bank by assets. After nine months of negotiations it has secured a 33.98% stake in Sekerbank for TL424.7 million ($256 million). The acquisition was conducted by BTA’s investment banking arm, TuranAlem Securities, whose chief executive, Kairat Bektanov, says that the Sekerbank transaction is part of an expansion strategy that has transformed BTA from a purely Kazakh operation into a major regional player. The bank already has subsidiaries in Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Ukraine as well as representative offices in China, Tajikistan and the United Arab Emirates.

FIAB and IADB aim to launch market for shares this year.

Dresdner Kleinwort has bolstered its Russia and the CIS investment banking franchise with the appointment of Igor Lojevsky as chairman of global banking and capital markets. He will join the bank in July following gardening leave, having most recently worked at Deutsche Bank in Moscow where he had been head of sales and origination for Russia and the CIS since 2005. Previously, Lojevsky had been co-head of investment banking for Vneshtorgbank in Moscow from 2003 to 2005 and had also worked in London from 2001 to 2003 for Deutsche Bank’s corporate finance team. Lojevsky effectively replaces Bob Foresman, who left the bank to become deputy chairman of local investment bank Renaissance Capital. Russia is Dresdner Kleinwort’s strongest market outside the UK and Germany. According to Dealogic, the bank was number one for Russian initial public offerings as of end-2006, Eurobonds and securitizations, and number two for syndicated loans.

Belgian bancassurance player KBC has become the latest foreign bank to buy into Russia. Late in April it agreed to pay up to €761 million to acquire at least 92.5% of Absolut Bank, 3.8 times the book value. It is the biggest banking M&A deal in Russia. Absolut Bank is one of the fastest-growing banks in Russia and has doubled its loan book on an annual basis for the past five years. "Over the past decade, KBC has built up a strong presence in many of the countries that joined the EU in May 2004 and January 2007. KBC’s long-term strategic plans entail further expansion in the markets of emerging Europe. Russia is therefore an extension of our existing presence in neighbouring central and eastern Europe," says André Bergen, KBC Group chief executive.

The US government has in recent weeks intensified its pressure on the international community to enforce sanctions against Iran in response to its continuing programme of uranium enrichment. It seems, however, that Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez will be among those world leaders who ignore the proposed boycott. "The only country that has developed atomic bombs and dropped them on entire peoples is the North American empire... they don’t have the morality to be giving anybody lessons," he said on his television programme Hello President.

Given that it bought Advantage Home Loans as long ago as December 2005, Morgan Stanley has taken its time to launch its first non-conforming RMBS transaction, ResLoc UK 2007-1. But the deal is not an Advantage deal; just 9.87% of the loans in the deal are actually originated by the lender. Morgan Stanley has been busy buying whole loan portfolios from other non-conforming lenders to ramp up this deal and the lion’s share of the collateral is actually originated by GMAC-RFC (79.9%). This will certainly offer investors comfort, given GMAC’s longevity in the sector. However, given the intense scrutiny that sub-prime lending has been under of late, the low, 6.1-month seasoning of the portfolio together with its 82.6% loan-to-value ratio might give some pause for thought. The US bank hired mortgage market veteran Rob Collins from Abbey last year to front its residential mortgage securitization business.

Credit Suisse closed the first issue of long/short collateralized commodity obligations notes in April. Rated AAA by Fitch Ratings and denominated in US dollars, euros and Australian dollars in three-year and five-year tranches, the $190 million issue of notes offers protected coupon payments and principal repayments based on the performance of long and short positions on a portfolio of commodities.

With Hoteloc still ringing in the market’s ears, Deutsche Bank’s conduit trips up on its pub valuations.

In the second half of last year, outstanding volumes of credit default swaps grew by 33%. This compares with the first half of the year, when outstanding CDS volumes grew by 52%. In 2005, CDS volumes rose by 105%. The numbers were produced by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, which announced on April 18 the results of its year-end 2006 market survey of privately negotiated derivatives.

Private equity specialist Carlyle is moving into the hedge fund business on the back of "client demand and product diversification", according to a source familiar with the firm.

The maturation of Asia’s hedge fund industry is evidenced by the number of new funds being set up by hedge fund employees in the region.

The Eurasian Development Bank, a new policy lender established in January 2006 by the governments of Kazakhstan and Russia, says its loan portfolio is set to hit $1 billion by the end of 2007 and $10 billion by 2012, from $216 million at the start of April this year. Igor Finogenov, chairman of the joint Russo-Kazakh policy lender, said in an interview with Euromoney that the first tranche of investments would be made in the two founding member countries, before being expanded to the rest of the Eurasian Economic Community, or EurAsEc, which comprises Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Three further countries hold the status of member-observer – Armenia, Moldova and Ukraine.

Political horse-trading in Serbia continues following the late January elections. However, despite the lack of a new government the country remains a strong magnet for foreign direct investment. In recent weeks, Serbia has concluded the politically sensitive sale of a leading mining company and the Belgrade Stock Exchange remains one of the best-performing bourses in the region. Romania’s Cuprom has secured the ownership of RTB Bor, Serbia’s largest copper mine, paying €303 million for a company the World Bank had suggested be closed down. Additionally, Cuprom has agreed to invest a further €137 million, alongside a €120 million commitment from the Serbian authorities to upgrade and provide equipment for the facility. Despite opposition from nationalist politicians and RTB Bor’s own management, the sale was pushed through by the outgoing government in the hope that it would boost economic prospects in Bor, one of Serbia’s poorest towns. Cuprom managing director Horia Simu says that the government had achieved the best possible price for the mine at a time of high copper prices. Copper prices have risen 44% in the past three months alone.