The landscape of the Italian banking market has been completely redrawn over the past 12 months but consolidation remains work in progress.

The gap between the top two and their closest rivals continues to increase, according to results from our recent survey on international cash management.

“When you talk about leasing, everyone thinks you’re talking about cars. My mother-in-law thinks I sell cars for a living”

Over the years ABN Amro has suffered a series of setbacks. But Niall Cameron argues that internal noise over organization charts has died down and the focus is on the business.

Buzz over US continues, but Europe still getting its act together.

There have been plenty of compelling reasons to go short credit as an asset class this year. Investment-grade corporates are under threat from leveraged takeover by huge private equity funds; at the lower end of the credit spectrum, the easy availability of cheap credit even to risky B-rated borrowers has stretched leverage ratios to unsustainable levels.

Appointment expected to renew exchange’s focus on stagnant volumes in options contracts.

FXMarketSpace has made four senior appointments as it gears up for its launch in 2007. Two of the appointments, Jane Forster and Dan Rosenberg, have been lured from rival EBS. Yigal Oren moves over from Reuters, FXMarketSpace’s 50% owner, and Debra Rabichow comes from futures commission merchant Goldenberg, Heymer & Co.

Hedge fund rating is a noble goal but Moody’s and S&P’s approaches fail to fill the bill.

Further regulation on delivery needed, says consultant.

Investors get fat yields as rating agencies seek extra credit enhancement.

52,300,000,000 funds raised in IPOs in dollars in the Emea region so far this year. That’s 60% up on funds raised over the same period in 2005.

Although NYSE member firms that conduct business with the public reported second-quarter 2006 after-tax profits of $2.95 billion and revenues of $78.64 billion, up from $1.13 billion and $53.32 billion in the second quarter of 2005, specialists reported a fall in both after tax profit and revenue. For the second quarter of 2006, NYSE specialists reported after-tax profit of just $26 million. During the same period in 2005, the specialists reported an after-tax profit of $33 million. Total specialist revenue in Q2 of 2006 was $215 million, compared with $220 million in Q2 of 2005.

As credit research is increasingly geared towards short-term trading ideas rather than fundamentals, there could be a dangerous dearth of information when defaults begin to rise.

More than 8,000 hedge funds are now registered in the Cayman Islands.

Eurozone countries are continuing to boost productivity vis-à-vis that in the US; consequently European equities are outperforming American ones.

"The bosses of Europe’s big three stock exchanges, the LSE, Deutsche Börse and Euronext, deserve to have their heads knocked together. They appear to have let their egos get in the way of getting together and forming a genuine European powerhouse."

IMF: Singapore welcomes the right sort of people

Investigations into the backdating of stock options has caused around half of the more than 100 companies under scrutiny by the SEC and/or the Department of Justice to miss deadlines for filing earnings. More are likely to follow, says Todd Fernandez, senior analyst at independent institutional research firm Glass Lewis & Co.

The man behind Man Group is to step down from his role of CEO.

In the article in the September issue of Euromoney entitled, "How

Stocks traded on emerging market stock exchanges now account for 16% of global equities, according to Standard & Poor’s. However, despite these stocks’ growing weight and in many cases improvements in transparency and corporate governance, investors remain fickle. According to data from Emerging Portfolio Fund Research, a fund flows tracker, investors pulled $15 billion from emerging market stocks between mid-May and mid-September, reducing the year-to-date cumulative inflow to $17 billion.

The possibility that the long end of the US yield curve might continue to invert has supported long-end issuance from international sovereign and supranational issuers.

Taking the successful US CRE CDO model and simply applying it to the European CMBS market is unlikely to work.

Graduation day might be approaching for some of the larger companies listed on London’s AIM (Alternative Investment Market) but the sheer volume of competitors means some might not make the cut.

The return of hard underwriting on recent bond deals underscores how mundane and risk-free the business had become.

Markets used to move at the hint of change in the political landscape. These days, surprise election results seem to have little or no impact.

“A private equity play in China is exactly that – a private equity play. The price may go up or down, but that’s not a China strategy”

Bavarian structured finance banker's national dress accidently arrives in suitcase packed for glittering awards do

Barclays Capital has decided to add algorithmic trading functionality to the front end of its Barx foreign exchange trading platform. The bank made its PowerFill service available to clients on its graphical user interface (GUI) on September 18.