It's the only private-sector bank to have retained its triple-A rating. What's more, Rabobank is the only foreign bank to have an office in Wagga Wagga. This cooperative, with 467 member banks in the Netherlands, was viewed as a domestic farmers' bank. But for three years that has been changing. First there were moves into insurance and asset management in the Netherlands. Then, for the past year-and-a-half, Rabobank International has been developing as an investment bank. Antony Currie spoke to Henk Visser, member of Rabobank Group's managing board, and Alex von Ungern-Sternberg, head of global investment banking.

Corporate bonds are even less developed in Scandinavia that in the rest of Europe, but a ratings culture could change all that.

Six months into European monetary union there's a crisis, but this has little to do with the euro. It's a classic banking fiasco kicked off because too many people believed in one man's Big Idea. Sound familiar? David Shirreff reports.

Credit Suisse First Boston's acquisition of BZW's equities and corporate advisory divisions at the start of the year was a quite coup for the Swiss bank (and cheap at twice the price the bank paid £100 million). At a stroke, the Swiss bank had suddenly become one of the top equity brokers in the UK, ranking second so far, up from 15th last year.

Now we have entered the era of globalized markets, the potential for regulators, investors and companies to clash over national classification is huge. Take the case of the merging automobile firms Daimler and Chrysler versus the Standard&Poor's 500 index, which tracks the stock prices of the biggest US corporates.

Striking out for the sectors

A well-trodden path leads from Eton College through Oxford University to the City of London. Christopher Mackenzie followed it, adding McKinsey, JP Morgan and Schroders. That conjures up a picture of institutional orthodoxy, but Mackenzie says he has always felt somewhat outside the formidable British establishment.

Meet some of the world's biggest investors. The 10 largest Japanese life insurance companies control assets of more than $1 trillion. But with a protected market and no shareholders to answer to, they have always done things a little differently to the rest of us. Now as insolvency fears and foreign competition grow, that is starting to change. Jack Lowenstein reports.

Which banks will weather the storm?

John Meriwether, whose hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) came so spectacularly unstuck last month, is celebrated for an almost bizarre ability to remain calm in the face of huge risk. His quiet, intensely private demeanour has long belied an almost obsessive hunger for ever bigger positions. "If you feel good about the market," he would tell young traders at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, "then get serious."

Cabbies the world over are never slow to offer their opinions on the state of their country's economy and politics.