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September 1999

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LATEST ARTICLES

  • Just suppose the World Bank's major shareholders decided they could use their money better elsewhere. Who would get the mandate to unwind or sell the bank's loan portfolio and how would it be done? One consultant, who prefers not to be named, suggested this as a hypothetical exercise, but colleagues feared it would be biting the hand that feeds them.
  • Management sages are rife but the office is an unenlightened place. Bob McGinnis, head of consumer asset-backed debt at Greenwich Capital in the US, complained to Euromoney that the French windows in his office didn't open and he couldn't practise his golf swing. When his comments found their way into print he was deluged by self-righteous colleagues and clients deploring his waste of valuable time contemplating leisure. For them the best office is one with no windows and the employees locked inside.
  • Philosophers have debated ethics for thousands of years and come up with more questions than answers. But now a super-smart Swiss asset manager has launched an ethical fund using a quantitative model to determine how naughty or nice companies are. Their efforts may not impress followers of Plato, Kant and Hume but will they persuade socially-concerned investors to part with their cash?
  • Deutsche Bank speaker Rolf Breuer recently boasted that his bank's value-at-risk (VAR) models were the only ones in Germany to be approved by the supervisors in Berlin.
  • Plummeting oil prices, turmoil in world markets and natural disasters: José Angel Gurría's first months as Mexico's finance secretary were a baptism of fire. But his legendary powers of persuasion enabled him to make vital budget cuts to keep Mexico on track. By Brian Caplen
  • Issuer: EuroCredit CDO 1
  • A new advisory science has been born this year in Europe: how to launch and defend hostile bids. The aggression and free-flowing finance are straight out of America, but the old continent's politics add an extra level of difficulty. The latest landmark battle, following the struggles for Telecom Italia, Gucci and Société Générale, is raging in the French oil sector. TotalFina's raid on Elf Aquitaine, and Elf's counter-attack, highlight once again the primacy of politics in shaping French business. The battle also provides Europe-wide lessons for the M&A tactical manual.
  • When Armínio Fraga quit his job at Soros Fund Management to become Brazil's central banker he was dubbed a "poacher turned gamekeeper". But he is no stranger to the public sector. With stability restored he is now modernizing Brazil's finance sector. Brian Caplen reports
  • Meet the new breed of Asian banker - the ones who survived the crisis and are now able to put their hard-learned lessons into practice. They are leading the way into a new era of openness and transparency in Asia.
  • A consolidation wave has broken over the Arab banks. In Bahrain, Gulf International Bank and Saudi International have created a new giant. In Saudi Arabia, Saudi American Bank and United Saudi Bank merged. Years of low oil prices and weak economies are the spur, though banks are still making profits. Commentary by Andrew Beikos and Elena Antoniou
  • The 17 superchefs of the European Central Bank who sit on its governing council have 17 ideas about how to set rates, and how transparent the process should be. From the orthodox toughness of Duisenberg and Issing to the softness on the Nordic and southern fringes. Here are the two Germans, two Frenchmen, two Dutchmen, two Finns, two Spaniards, two Italians, the Austrian, Irishman, Portuguese, Belgian and Luxembourgois who rule euroland. By David Lanchner
  • Fringe protesters at the IMF/World Bank annual meetings are nothing new. But once they could be easily dismissed as Utopians or religious nutters not worth taking seriously. No longer.
  • Croatia has too many banks and most of them are poorly run. Bad debts are on the rise. Related lending has been widespread. The government has taken some banks under its wing and hopes to rehabilitate and privatize them. Yet fundamental reform of the sector is coming too slowly and in insufficient doses. Alex Mathias reports.
  • After eight years of campaigning, Germany's private-sector banks finally won a judgment in Brussels against WestLB's contentious capital-raising scheme, striking a blow at the financing privileges of state-owned banks. But WestLB chairman Friedel Neuber barely missed a beat: in less than a month he had demonstrated his political shareholders' loyalty by arranging yet another capital increase. Cowed by an angry government, the private banks dare not take the challenge to its logical conclusion. They fear losing more than they would gain, says Laura Covill.
  • As Daewoo, once symbolic of the strength of new Korea, is forced into dismemberment because of crippling debt, the government hopes the demise of the second largest of Korea's chaebols will spur others to restructure to avoid a similar fate. However, there is a worry that economic recovery has taken some of the pressure off chaebol chiefs. Steven Irvine reports
  • Last month Front End had a little jest at the expense of one of the runners in the Chase Corporate Challenge fun run recently held in London's Battersea Park. One brave soul, you may recall, was spotted heading for the finishing line in a Yamaichi T-shirt.
  • Ireland has transformed its economy in recent years, luring multinational companies by offering low taxes and well-educated labour. Its participation in European economic and monetary union has also been an attraction. The economy has boomed. Ireland is running budget surpluses and paying down its debt out of privatization proceeds. But being a small nation in euroland also brings difficulties, like wholly inappropriate interest rates. The Irish economic miracle could be heading for disaster -- extraordinary rates of growth could well lead on to rampant inflation. Nick Kochan reports
  • Rolf Breuer, speaker of Deutsche Bank, defends the purchase of Bankers Trust
  • The announcement from Jamil Mahuad, the president of Ecuador, that the country would not meet a coupon payment on its Brady bonds due at the end of August and that Ecuador intends to restructure its $13 billion of foreign debt, has dismayed banks and investors across the developed world.
  • James Wolfensohn is about to reach a milestone. His five-year term at the helm of the World Bank is coming to an end. US president Bill Clinton will shortly decide whether to reappoint him. James Smalhout examines the record.
  • World Bank president James Wolfensohn believes the Bank is becoming a more caring place, closer to the client it's trying to serve. One advanced management course includes a taste of poverty: living a week in a slum or village. Social aspects must match financial and macro concerns, he tells James Smalhout
  • Edited by Brian Caplen
  • Equities might enjoy all the glory at the moment but watch out for credit. This techno-laggard of the financial markets is set for an electronic great leap forward. If proof were needed - even the venerable CBOT has been showing interest. Antony Currie logs on.
  • Banks, like priests before them, have survived in part because of their monopoly of information and access. The internet is changing all that. As Steven Irvine argues, the data and choices that can be accessed with a mouse click must mean the death of banks as we know them.
  • Ten years after the Japanese stock market suffered its dramatic plunge, following a decade in which the Japanese economic model - with its corporate cross-shareholdings, scandal-ridden financial sector, and notorious convoy system which prevents well-managed companies from outperforming the bad - has been pilloried, Japanese equity markets are suddenly soaring.
  • In the run-up to the European single currency there were expectations of major political changes that might take place after monetary union leading to more decentralized funding, with local authorities and regions issuing more and sovereigns less. Generally in the eurozone this change has been slow in coming. Spain is a key test case. Any significant increase in debt issuance by local authorities may hinge on political horse-trading between the central government and the "fast-track" autonomous regions.
  • When former paratrooper and failed coup leader Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in December promising to do whatever was necessary to improve the lot of the bulk of the population, the country's bankers weren't sure what kind of treatment they could expect. They are beginning to find out.
  • "Unreal city," wrote TS Eliot about London in his 1922 poem The Wasteland. If London induced feelings of bewilderment in Eliot one struggles to imagine what he might have thought about Washington DC. Between M Street in Georgetown and Independence Avenue on Capitol Hill are a couple of square miles into which many of the world's most rarefied institutions are concentrated. Here decisions are taken with resounding affects both across the US and the world. Yet the institutions are cocooned from the actualities over which they preside. There is an air of unreality about majestic Washington.
  • The figures are alarming. A worldwide survey by Standard & Poor's shows that 55 rated companies failed in the first half of 1999, defaulting on total debts of $20.5 billion. That easily exceeds the 37 failures and $8.3 billion in defaulted debts in the second half of 1998, when the rising default trend began. What's worrying is that, while common sense and historical data teach that the level and volatility of default rates rises in a recession, the US is in anything but that.
  • Nothing surprises crisis-hardened Desmond Supple any more, but even he was left slightly baffled by Malaysia's bid to resurrect talk of a single south-east Asian currency. Supple, head of research at Barclays Capital in Singapore, deftly reeled off reasons why, in his opinion, such a concept would not work, at least for the foreseeable future. Variations in development levels between the countries and differences in business cycles are top of Supple's list.