President of Panama’s Bolsa de Valores expects new exchange to be created next year.

Colombia’s financial institutions continue to be in good shape. They expect record profits for 2008, despite the global turmoil. For the first seven months of 2008, the Colombian banking system reported a net profit of $1.43 billion, a 30.9% increase on the same period in 2007. "Last year was a record year for Citi Colombia in terms of profit and growth, but we expect to close this year with even better profit growth rates," says Francisco Aristeguieta, country head of Citi Colombia and head of the Andean region for Citi.

One deal apologists for Lehman Brothers might not cite was its raising almost $300 million for an island nation of just 80,000 people. Indeed, the Seychelles looks a likely candidate for the title of Africa’s first sovereign Eurobond defaulter of the new millennium.

For so long seen as a banking backwater, cash management’s time has come. Revenues are high-margin, stable and growing. Products such as liquidity management will only grow in importance. And, with the huge client bases involved for the biggest players, it’s a gateway into a lot of other business. Laurence Neville reports.

The Lehman Brothers website, may have provided a little insight as to why the bank collapsed last month. According to the Life at Lehman, People section of the website, one employee called Margot at the bank was surprised she made the grade:

As the financial turmoil claims its latest victims, holders of covered bonds see the strength of their investments.

On September 29 the Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced its most severe one-day decline in history. Of the S&P index’s 500 names, just one enjoyed a share price rise:

The financial crisis has finally taken its toll on the money markets.

Several of Deutsche Bank’s clients had problems with the pricing they were getting electronically when they have came to roll positions forward at the end of September. When these have been queried on the telephone, the prices have apparently been requoted more accurately in line with prevailing rates in the market.

The failure of the US House of Representatives to pass the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 at its first reading on September 29 came despite the entreaties of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association to its members to call their congressmen before noon that day to explain to them why the legislation must pass.

Bank failures used to be massive news. But with so many cropping up these days they have, like world records at the Beijing Olympics, lost something of their shock value. How then to judge which have made the biggest waves?

At the beginning of 2007, Euromoney wrote that the retail lending boom in the Balkans was putting pressure on the region’s banking systems and that cooperation between banks and authorities was vital. But as the world’s economic downturn pushes into southeastern Europe, that warning might be going unheeded. Jethro Wookey reports.

Fortis announced in a statement on September 30 that it would not complete a planned sale of 50% of its asset management business to China’s Ping An. The recently part-nationalized Belgian/Dutch group cited "the current severe market disruption and the ongoing uncertainty in the global capital markets" as the reason for pulling the deal, which would have been worth $3 billion. Fortis will instead retain 100% control of Fortis Investments, which has now completely integrated ABN Amro’s asset management business.

Broadly, hedge funds began to feel the full effects of market turmoil in the second half of 2008, although pockets of outperformance persist. Neil Wilson identifies the strategies likely to do best in a transformed market.

The CDS market is trying to withstand the strain of three almost simultaneous counterparty defaults.

A week, they say, is a long time in politics. We now know that a week can be an eternity in the financial markets, especially when it starts with Lehman Brothers going bust and ends with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley becoming licensed deposit takers so that they can snuggle closer to the Federal Reserve. Oh, and in between, you had the rescue of the largest US insurance company, AIG and the proposed Stalinization of US capitalism financed by the Land of the Free’s taxpayers.

International market access not yet certain.

Longevity risk is a continuing, ever changing problem for pension schemes, determining the assets they have to deploy to cover their liabilities. Seven specialists look at how risk is identified and the different techniques and products available to cope with it.

Despite initial fears, the foreign exchange market appears to have handled Lehman Brothers’ collapse into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection remarkably well. According to Rob Close, chief executive of CLS Bank, which settles the bulk of the market’s transactions, few deals that had Lehman as a counterparty were rescinded.

"I’m nothing like Howard Hughes. He was something of an eccentric. I have a very normal life"

"I remember going into the Fed for meetings on the LTCM rescue plan. At one end of the table there was Jimmy Cayne, at the other Dick Fuld. Now the table is a lot smaller and the faces are not so familiar"

Have the big Japanese banks been over-cautious about buying stakes in troubled western peers?

Investors who bought into the bank hybrid argument are unlikely to do so again in a hurry.

Proposals to make a settlement with hold-outs to Argentina’s defaulted bonds could raise the country much-needed funds.

African borrowers and international lenders need to be judicious in their approach to funding on the back of new energy discoveries.

The US bank (and it will take a while to get used to calling it such) stays one step ahead of the pack through successful capital raisings.

Indian bank suffers from loss of confidence as crisis spreads beyond the US and Europe.

Analysts at JPMorgan suggest that prime money market funds, which had $2 trillion of assets under management in early September and are a leading provider of short-term liquidity to the banking system, suffered between $350 billion and $400 billion of redemptions after the Prime Reserve fund broke the buck following losses on its $385 million holdings of Lehman commercial paper.

Rightly or wrongly, credit derivatives will pay the price for failings across the entire credit market.