Published in conjunction with: Banco Santander Totta -- Espírito Santo Investment -- Caixa - Banco de Investimento

2010 ranking of real estate advisors and consultants, developer services, banks, investment managers and property managers.

With some $1.4 trillion of commercial real estate loan maturities looming over the next four years and traditional funding markets still in intensive care, CRE recovery is entering a critical phase in the US and Europe. However, cash-rich domestic buyers are already driving regional growth in Asia and are cherry-picking top assets in the west. Joti Mangat reports.

"The worst thing is the uncertainty. Just give us a set of rules and then we’ll figure out how to work round them... I mean work with them"

Budding entrepreneurs wanting to make the really big bucks should look at the rewards for failure that persist despite the financial turmoil of recent years.

While God’s banker Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, likes to do much of his work at 200 West Street in Lower Manhattan, the financial historian Niall Ferguson chose to publicize his latest work, a biography of Siegmund Warburg, at St Paul’s Cathedral in London last month, with an accompanying and passionate sermon on the morality of finance. One fashionably late Euromoney correspondent arrived five minutes after the address had begun, to find standing room only, as Ferguson stood upon a specially constructed pulpit evangelizing about the need for a new order in the world of finance.

The UK stopped jailing debtors in 1869 but a subsidiary of UK bank HSBC defends the survival of the practice in the UAE, according to local weekly Arabian Business.

Asia’s property markets avoided the worst of the global financial crisis and Chinese buyers are leading the way in global commercial real estate turnover, even as the country’s domestic property market struggles with the fallout from overheating. Joti Mangat reports.

Capital markets development in the Caribbean has hit the buffers because of the limited size of individual economies. More inter-state cooperation and integration is a vital precondition of growth. Jason Mitchell reports.

"There may well be some market participants who want us to not comply with the statute, they may want to interpret it softly. But Congress really did say there’s got to be comprehensive regulation of the dealers, there’s got to be a mandate for clearing and there is a requirement for trading and real-time reporting"

A CNBC report describes the trend in mainland China of hiring "fake executives": westerners recruited by Chinese companies to lend an image of cosmopolitan internationalism

Corporate responses to the financial crisis are forcing banks with liquidity management services to come up with new tools and techniques. Clients are demanding more visibility, control and optimization.

Turkey’s relatively strong economic performance looks set to be sustained if fiscal self-discipline and sound banking practices are maintained. Euromoney’s roundtable examines the factors in the country’s favour and potential weaknesses.

In the gripping document The history and development of the Deutsche Bank logo, available on the company’s website to all interested readers, an unnamed author details the various icons the German bank has used down the ages. Replacing the now-ominous imperial eagle of the early 1900s and the bland ‘DB in an oval’ of the mid-20th century, the current ‘slash in a square’ was adopted in 1974. The slash apparently stands for growth, while "the square-shaped frame can be interpreted as a sign of security". The logo, we are told, was the design of a now deceased graphic artist from Stuttgart named Anton Stankowski; he is said to have submitted the image alongside seven other competitors in 1972. This is as convenient a creation myth as any, but intrepid research in the jungles of Cambodia by Euromoney has revealed the possibility of a far more sinister origin for the logo. We found this archway, with its uncanny resemblance to the DB logo, in the ruins of the East Mebon temple near to Angkor Wat.

HSBC’s purchase of South Africa’s Nedbank will offer big advantages for both partners. HSBC will gain it first substantive presence in Africa – and not just South Africa – and Nedbank will draw on HSBC’s global links and know-how. Nick Kochan reports.

Projects such as an elite management school, a Moscow technology park, a nanotechnology fund and plans to turn Moscow into a global financial centre are all designed to move Russia away from dependence on energy and metals productions. How successful will they be? Elliot Wilson reports.

When their traditional German investor base was blown away by the financial crisis, sovereign funding officials in central Europe had to adjust to a world of hefty spreads and hard work. Two years on, their efforts are paying handsome dividends. Lucy Fitzgeorge-Parker reports.

Ambitious plans for international financial centres in the Gulf states of Dubai, Qatar and Bahrain that would be hubs for financial services in a broadly defined region are still a long way off being fulfilled. Dominic Dudley looks at the likely outcomes.

The country’s banking reforms are going well and attracting regional interest. But western banking groups remain largely excluded because of Bush-era sanctions. Are they missing out on an incipient boom market? Nick Lord reports from Damascus.

Mexico’s investment banking climate is improving after some big M&A deals and the end of an almost two-year drought in IPO transactions. Jason Mitchell reports from Mexico City.

Managers at Austrian bank RZB and its central and eastern European subsidiary, Raiffeisen International, hope that a merger between the two will help maintain its position as a market leader in the region. Sudip Roy talks to Herbert Stepic, who will lead the newly merged entity.

The bank’s chief executive says it has little interest in risky opportunities in foreign emerging markets when it is based in the world’s strongest emerging market – one it fully understands. Rob Dwyer reports.

Governor Sheikh Salem Al Sabah is leading efforts to deal with the chaos left from years of property and stock speculation. But as Dominic O’Neill asks at the central bank’s office in Kuwait, is the clean-up anywhere near complete? Is structural change possible?

Like Standard Bank, its better-known rival, South Africa’s FirstRand has seen the advantages of links with the burgeoning Asian markets, notably through a tie-up with Chinese bank CCB and a direct presence in India. Nick Kochan reports.

The country’s banking system breezed through the global financial crisis with an ease few thought possible. Its economy is likely to boom as a trading hub for the region. It is no wonder banks such as HSBC are looking to increase their presence. Nick Lord reports from Istanbul.

Across Africa, French leadership in banking is being replaced as Moroccan banks expand south of their borders, reviving historical political influences and ancient trade routes. Are these dreams sustainable or are they adventures heading towards disaster? Dominic O’Neill reports from Casablanca.

Brazilian structured credit based on such underlyings as consumer loans, auto finance and trade receivables is in rude health but the underdeveloped RMBS and CMBS market will only take off with greater supply. Even then, investors may be wary of buying it. Rob Dwyer reports from São Paulo.

Against the odds the sector has weathered the economic downturn and is now poised to show healthy growth as the country emerges from recession. Guy Norton reports.

In August 2009 the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria announced that he was removing the top management of five leading Nigerian banks as part of a bailout package. More bosses were subsequently thrown out. About 200 bankers and investors are now facing criminal investigations. Here for the first time, Sanusi explains to Nick Kochan why he intervened.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has become one of the top-five investment banks in Latin America in just two years. There are plans to double revenues over the next three. In its new role as a universal bank, will BAML be able to compete with the international banking incumbents? Helen Avery reports.