UBS heads the Dealogic league table for investment banking fees earned between January and September this year. The Swiss bank, which was awarded the title of best investment bank in Asia in Euromoney’s Awards for Excellence 2008, took a 5% market share with $323 million in fees during the nine-month period. Citi and Goldman Sachs were second and third respectively.

UniCredit is one of the world’s biggest financial groups but concerns over its capital base have made it vulnerable to panic-stricken investors.

It might have been the most turbulent month in memory for global stock markets but equity capital raisings did not grind to a halt. In fact, September has seen a spate of equity raisings from banks despite, or rather because of, the fact that they are at the centre of the market’s turbulence.

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.

The growth in Islamic finance has slowed with the deepening credit crunch but the Saudi Binladin Group has raised the first sukuk for the world’s most holy boom town: Mecca.

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?

A week after Lehman Brothers collapsed, the United Arab Emirates central bank announced a new credit line of a dirham equivalent of $14 billion. Was it a signal to investors that the federation would not sit by and watch as the economy of Dubai – its second-biggest constituent – went into free fall?

The flamboyant stage presence and forthright views of Kotaro Tamura are becoming something of an annual highlight at Euromoney’s Japan Capital Markets Congress, and this year the LDP senator in charge of the sovereign wealth fund committee surpassed himself during an onstage interview that at times reduced a packed auditorium to helpless, if somewhat nervous, laughter.

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.

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 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:

"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?

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

Freddie Mac is seeking to reassure holders of its debt that the preferred stock purchase agreement announced by US Treasury secretary Henry Paulson will protect them, "regardless of who wins the elections".

Data provider Markit announced at the end of September that it was planning to offer free access to its daily CDS pricing data to non-clients for a limited time. It also announced that buy-side accounts that wanted to confirm index trades would be given free access to its RED (reference entity database) system – again for a limited time. This largesse follows Markit’s decision earlier this year to offer free access to RED for buy-siders that only trade lightly in the CDS market. The moves will be welcomed by the smaller, second-tier institutions involved in the CDS market that have struggled to get access to information following the credit events at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and WaMu.

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

The relaunch of FX futures by Ice finally provides the CME with some proper competition.

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

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.

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.

Surely it was high time Lloyds TSB made a life-changing acquisition? Surely it had the balance sheet to do so? And surely assets were available at a never-to-be-repeated price? Philip Moore put these questions to Lloyds’ finance director less than a month before its shotgun wedding with HBOS. It’s clear that making a transformational deal for the UK bank was only a matter of time.

The Spanish central bank prevented its financial institutions from investing heavily in the US sub-prime related securities. But Spain’s mid-tier banks are heavily exposed to a local property sector in crisis. Can they ride out the downturn? Peter Koh reports.

The US government warned that failure to pass the Paulson plan into law would lead to disaster. In the worst-case outcome, that could mean wholesale nationalization of the finance industry. With Frannie and AIG, and a banking system that fails without dramatic Fed intervention, the Bush administration has already made a start. Peter Lee looks at alternative strategies that might prove sharper than Tarp.

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

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

The rapid and decisive intervention of European national authorities to prop up vulnerable banks might well limit the extent of European banks’ funding problems.

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.

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

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

The outcry against and restrictions on short-selling of financials stocks were unjustified and ill-advised and will have a deleterious impact.

Deutsche Bank is taking a 40% strategic stake in Russian fund manager UFG Invest, one of the top 10 players in the Russian asset management industry. Under the terms of the agreement between the two firms, Deutsche will have the option to increase its holding to 100%. Deutsche’s existing fund business, DWS Investments, will be combined with UFG Invest and the new entity will be branded Deutsche UFG Capital Management. "[This] transaction further strengthens our role in Russia," says Igor Lojevsky, chief executive of Deutsche Bank Russia.

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.

Saxo Bank, despite reporting increased profitability, has shed about a third of its workforce. About 300 jobs have been axed at its Copenhagen headquarters, with up to 50 disappearing in London. The bank is believed to be reviewing its operations in both Singapore and Switzerland in particular. The cost-cutting comes after Saxo embarked on a spell of rapid and aggressive expansion. Its staffing level is now virtually back to where it was a year ago.

The US economy is far more resilient than some commentators think. The present crisis also creates an opportunity for the Treasury to help itself and many pension funds.

Short of a radical restructuring of the banking sector, the US government bailout will prompt a market rally. However the longer-term effects will be deleterious.

As the region’s stock markets tumble and the international bond market shows no sign of opening, Latin American companies in need of cash are turning to plan B. "The loan market is still open in Brazil. There is also securitization. At the moment there is a plan B beyond the international bond market that will work for many Latin companies, especially for those in Brazil," Dan Vallimarescu, head of debt capital markets at Santander, told Euromoney just days after Lehman Brothers’ collapse. "Several issuers are getting a bank deal done quietly," says Chris Gilfond, joint head of Latin American debt at Citi. "People are also staying local and/or regional. For example, in Mexico and Peru the local debt capital markets business has been doing very well."

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.

Fund suggests some European financials are an opportunity.

Bans on short sales, of naked shorting, and variations thereof were the order of the day in the second half of September as countries around the world attempted to stop stock markets falling.

International market access not yet certain.

Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, ordered the US ambassador, Patrick Duddy, to leave the country last month. Chávez accused the Bush administration of planning a coup to overthrow him. Alleged conspirators have been detained. The Venezuelan president also recalled his envoy in Washington. Chávez said: "When there is a new government in the US, we’ll send an ambassador." These moves came shortly after the US government expelled the Bolivian ambassador after the Bolivians sent the US ambassador home. Chávez is a close ally of Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales. Both are antagonists of president George W Bush.

It was not only US investment banks such as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch that found themselves in dire trouble in September. In the middle of the month, Russia’s KIT Finance found itself unable to meet repo obligations and had to hurriedly find a strategic buyer to prevent itself following Lehman’s fate. According to market sources, KIT Finance failed to settle repo obligations worth about Rb6 billion to Rb8 billion ($153 million to $230 million) In the end the company was rescued by Leader Asset Management, the pension fund arm of Russian energy company Gazprom.

JPMorgan has unveiled a new e-commerce offering. Developed internally, the platform, MorganDirect, can be used to trade spot, forwards and outrights from either desktops or BlackBerries, 24 hours a day. MorganDirect will provide streaming rates for more than 300 currency pairs and the bank says that other products and assets will be added in due course. Elsewhere, JPMorgan has replaced AIG as the central counterparty on Currenex’s FXTrades platform.

One of the curiosities of the financial meltdown has been the conspicuous absence of China’s leading commercial banks and brokerages in picking up bargains from the wreckage.

Unibanco, which has a 52% stake in Brazilian insurance joint venture Unibanco AIG, is looking at buying the remaining share of the company if it goes on sale. The unit’s president, Jose Rudge, hinted in a conference call in September that Unibanco had the first right of refusal for the 48% share. "We are very attuned to opportunities that may arise from this and would analyse the opportunity to buy if it were for sale," says Rudge, adding that this would be a natural step for Unibanco. He declined to comment on whether AIG had offered to sell, or if Unibanco was in direct acquisition talks.

The Digicel Group is planning a multi-million investment in central America in the coming year. The investment will focus on technology, equipment and customer offers in an attempt to shake up the competition in the region. Luis La Rocca, Digicel manager for El Salvador, said the company had already invested $2.5 billion in developing its network, which has more than 7 million customers.

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

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.

Even Kazakh bank employees are joining investors in a flight to quality away from the sector. BTA Bank and Kazkommertzbank are overwhelmed by foreign debt too eagerly lent out at home and only Halyk is in good shape. Although there are still a few potential foreign buyers nosing around Kazakh financial assets, Raiffeisen for one has decided that its ambitions in the country will be best fulfilled through a greenfield operation. Elliot Wilson reports.

Onexim Group, one of Russia’s largest private investment funds, with more than $25 billion in assets, has entered into a strategic agreement whereby it will acquire a 50% interest in Renaissance Capital, the market-leading investment bank in Russia, the CIS and Africa. Commenting on the transaction, Stephen Jennings, Renaissance Group chief executive, says: "The partnership with Onexim creates a financial powerhouse with the resources, skills and ambition to be the clear leader in all its markets."

Having brushed with Indonesian politics, Gita Wirjawan knows how dirty it can be. Business development has more to offer his country, he reckons, hence his Indonesia-centric private equity business Ancora, which is attracting investors from the wider Muslim world. Eric Ellis reports.

Eurasia Capital Management (ECM) has created the first-ever Uzbekistan-dedicated hedge fund. The Uzbekistan Growth Fund was launched in September with initial capital of just $5 million but ECM founder and managing partner Alisher Ali Djumanov believes that the open-ended investment vehicle could grow substantially over the next couple of years.

Chris Lees has been officially unveiled as the new head of financial institutions group origination in debt capital markets at Citi. He reports to Eirik Winter, head of DCM EMEA. Lees previously spent much of his career at Citi in the European syndicate team where he worked in the high-grade sector. His appointment fills a gap in the origination wall chart at Citi since Alan Patterson moved to run its capital markets product group in March 2007.

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

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.

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.

Millennium Global Investments has been awarded a A$450 million ($370 million) active currency overlay mandate by Vision Super, the A$4.3 billion Australian superannuation fund. The fund manages defined contribution and defined benefit schemes on behalf of 100,000 members and provides superannuation and retirement incomes to local government authorities, primarily in the State of Victoria.

It will take months if not years before we know with any certainty who the ultimate winners from the financial crisis will be. But having purchased the US businesses of Lehman Brothers it seems that Barclays Capital will be among them.

Standard & Poor’s has begun assigning recovery ratings to the debt of 16 speculative-grade-rated Mexican corporations, as global investors are forced to place more focus on the recovery of principal after a borrower’s potential default.

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

Dubai Islamic Bank has appointed a new chief executive. Abdulla Al Hamli moves to the position from his role as chief of operations and information technology at the bank. Al Hamli has worked at DIB for nine years. For more than 10 years before that, he was director of information systems at the Dubai Ports Authority and Jebel Ali Free Zone.The previous chief executive, Saad Abdul Razak, left in late 2007 to join the Investment Corporation of Dubai.

Citi hired seven sales bankers from Lehman Brothers’ interest rates team last month. It comes as the administrator of Lehman’s remaining European business announced 750 job cuts, predominantly in fixed income, on September 30.

Insurers troubles spill over causing retail panic.

JPMorgan stopped counterparty trading with Citadel last month in protest at the $20 billion hedge fund’s recent hires of the bank’s staff. Employees at JPMorgan were told to stop trading stocks, bonds and currencies with Citadel. However, the dispute lasted only 24 hours. Both parties declined to comment but sources say relations between the two firms began to sour in March, when Patrik Edsparr left JPMorgan to run Europe and fixed income for Citadel. There have been several other hires from JPMorgan since that time, more lately Brian McDonald, formerly a managing director and senior portfolio manager with the US bank’s ABS Principal Investments Group. The final straw, though was the hire of Greg Boester, an adjustable-rate mortgage securities trader with the bank.

Just a few months into the chief executive role at Westpac, Gail Kelly has bought out her former employer, St George Bank. A convinced advocate of the power of branding, Kelly has pledged that St George will retain its identity. Chris Wright spoke to Kelly about the prospects for the combined entity.

Mian Mansha owns one of the best banks in Asia but his ambitions reach much further. His empire incorporates insurance, cement, textiles, infrastructure and power generation. In his first-ever interview with the foreign media, he tells Elliot Wilson of his plans to list his holding company on the London Stock Exchange within the next two years, and expand across Asia into the Middle East, emerging Europe and beyond.

Exchanges try to steal a march on their rivals.

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.

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.

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.

Hank Paulson’s desperate attempts to keep the world financial system afloat show that, despite his many qualities, he is the wrong man for the job. Clive Horwood and Peter Lee report.

Is the new Nomura a threat to the dominant investment banks in the Asia-Pacific region?

Market share expected to be more evenly spread.

Greek banks’ share prices plummeted in 2008 – even before Lehman collapsed. Despite this, as well as higher inflation, slower economic growth and more taxes, they have ploughed on with ambitious regional expansion plans. Can Greek banks defy the global financial crisis? Dominic O’Neill reports from Athens.

Funds seek alternative methods to sell options.