While many focused their attention on JPMorgan Chase's acquisition of the hedge fund Highbridge, another nimble operator was busily getting ready for its initial public offering. On September 30 Primus Guaranty raised $139.7 million.

Asset managers' clients are increasingly demanding specialist input to mandates. It's a demand best met by boutiques or big firms that have set up boutique-like teams. Deutsche Asset Management has been tardy in responding to these pressures. It is now changing its style, but has it left it too late?

The Church of England's senior prelate, Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, hosted a lively discussion about capital flows in the global economy and their impact on emerging markets last month.

A burst of primary market activity in Europe last month had equity capital markets bankers predicting a busy fourth quarter. This might be wishful thinking. Although historical data suggest that the months after a US presidential election are usually relatively buoyant, confidence surveys indicate that equity investors are still in cautious and highly selective mood.

If you're looking for enlightenment from Bush or Kerry on how best to shape the economy over the next four years, look again. Neither presents a viable strategy for the deficit or the entitlement programmes, social security, medicare and Medicaid.

For years, Thai Military Bank remained an anomaly in Thailand's financial sector. Founded by the armed forces to provide financial services for their personnel, the bank has struggled with both its business and identity. Having just completed Thailand's only three-way banking merger, management aims to change all of that.

After years of negotiations, Serbia has signed a deal with London Club creditors to restructure about $2.8 billion in debt. The deal paves the way for the sovereign's return to the capital markets later this year. But how will Serbia be received there, and who did the deal favour?

In the past two years, Swedish private-equity house Industri Kapital has endured a protracted and difficult fund-raising process for its fifth fund, which ultimately closed at just a third of the original e2.5 billion target size. But after responding to investors' concerns by returning to its small to medium mid-cap focus and achieving a string of highly lucrative exits this year, the future looks brighter.

Professional services

This year, for the first time, Euromoney has presented its award for central bank governor of the year to someone who isn't a central bank governor (see Euromoney September 2004). At the end of September, two weeks before the IMF/World Bank meetings, the mandate of Argentina's Alfonso Prat-Gay expired and president Néstor Kirchner did not renew it. By Argentine standards, Prat-Gay had a good term. As he said, when receiving his award from Padraic Fallon, chairman of Euromoney Institutional Investor: "When we took office in December 2002 we had a lot of ambitions, the main one being to make it to the end of the term – this being a country whose central bank is only 68 years old and has had 48 governors along the way."

As Euromoney goes to press, Santander is set to take over the UK's Abbey National, propelling the Spanish bank into the frontline of European retail banking. But the past won't go away for Santander chairman Emilio Botín. The Spanish courts have ruled that he has serious charges to answer. At the same time minority shareholders who harangue him at Santander's AGM are planning to put their case to Abbey investors in London. Ben Sills reports from Madrid.