The advent of whole-business securitization and the creation of a liquid market in project-related debt has opened investors’ eyes to the rewards available in infrastructure. Governments’ desire for off-balance-sheet funding has also boosted the supply of suitable investments. But what makes infrastructure different? How do you buy it, sell it and manage it?

Hedge fund managers need to realize that many investors will be attracted most by track record and big-name managers.

Access to collateral is the number one topic of conversation in the CLO market. But if a viable leveraged loan CDS market develops, Christmas will have come early for many players.

British Land’s decision to convert to a Reit might prompt the restructuring of its Meadowhall securitization.

Bankruptcy of Nici shows vulnerability of small German SME securitizations.

The eagerly awaited opening up of mainland China to Reits investment continues to hang fire but the market is hot elsewhere in the region, with retail and institutional investors piling into new issues. Some in the market, though, reckon that investors often have over-inflated expectations of Reits’ returns and a poor grasp of the complexities of the deals. Chris Wright reports.

Otmar Issing has been the most impressive advocate of the ECB. What happens now that the bank has lost its implicit third pillar in monetary policy?

The National Bank of Slovakia is likely to consider a 50 basis point rate increase this month as the koruna’s failure to appreciate in recent months drives inflation, according to analysts at Deutsche Bank. The Slovak Republic enjoyed an acceleration of real GDP growth to 6% in 2005, and the central bank felt confident enough to issue a target inflation rate of below 2% by 2007. But the currency’s disappointing performance has led to higher than expected inflation this year, and the strong suspicion that the NBS will buy crowns if further tightening doesn’t prevent further depreciation.

AXA’s proposed extreme mortality cat bond will set the tone for the insurance securitization sector this year.

Greek real estate moves into catch-up mode

Barely a month seems to pass without either the launch of a new foreign exchange trading platform or at the least a significant enhancement and upgrade to an existing one.

Financiers in the Caribbean are planning to establish a region-wide capital markets exchange to create a financial hub with critical mass.

Spain’s securitization market grew by more than 35% last year, driven by demand for more, and more flexible, mortgage credit. Specialist investors are now hoping that issuers can be persuaded to sell first-loss exposure to this risk. This comes, though, as concerns grow about the potential fallout from a seemingly unsustainable house price boom. Louise Bowman reports.

Spacs increasingly interested in listing on UK's Alternative Investment Market.

One piece of analysis that is certain to be a fixture on desks this summer is a 59-page report by Goldman Sachs. In preparation for the football World Cup, which kicks off on June 9 in Germany, Goldman Sachs has put together a guide to each participating country and its team’s chances of success.

The bad news for Mexicans is that their country is one of the most prone to earthquakes. But at least the government’s financial resources will not be stretched to the limit should one strike following the launch of a $160 million catastrophe bond last month – the region’s first.

Too much of a good thing can be harmful, and so it is proving with Asia’s fledgling real estate investment trust sector. Given Asian markets’ passion for property, Reits were always going to be popular. Now one of the latest offerings suggests that investors are becoming more discerning.

If a product swamps a market, prices go down. Yet this basic economic tenet seems to have eluded many of the issuers in the Spanish covered bonds market. How else to explain the consistent lack of coordination in issuance endemic in the world of the cédulas?

Following a two-year hiatus, Belgium settles trade with Citi.

A busy sporting calendar means a burgeoning expense account for many investment banks.

Lebanon puts itself back at the hub

UBS has appointed Tom Fox and Matthew Koder as joint global heads of equity capital markets, replacing Lucinda Riches, who has headed the division for the past seven years.

I was lunching at Cecconi’s with my friend Richard. Cecconi’s is an Italian restaurant in Mayfair frequented by hedge fund hotties, Latvian lovelies with pneumatic mammaries and the odd voyeur such as myself. Dame Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of publishing group Pearson – or her doppelganger – was at the next table. Regretfully, under my Cecconi classification system, she falls into the voyeur category. Well she’s hardly a buxom Latvian is she? Richard is the brother I never had. He is funny, clever, irreverent and, in his spare time, a successful investment banker. If he weren’t one of my closest friends, I would hate him for the insouciance of it all.

Although adoption of an exchange-like structure has been predicted for years, foreign exchange has predominantly been traded over the counter. Could a new initiative by the CME and Reuters finally force the transition through? Lee Oliver reports.

Here are the bond issuers that have taken the market by storm over the past 12 months: from the IFC, punching above its weight within the World Bank group with its pioneering work in developing local bond markets, to Bayer’s use of innovative methods to maintain its credit profile while making acquisitions.

Despite its size and maturity, the covered bond market is fast changing. New countries, new asset classes and new issuers vie for investors. But does the conflict between regulators’ desire for quality and consistency clash with investors’ needs for yield and diversification?

“It’s so bloody liquid, it’s not even funny.”

NAIC’s SVO brings further woe to the hybrids industry; the US market looks less viable than it once did.

Despite brighter prospects for the Japanese economy, corporate issuers are not rushing back to the international or domestic bond markets. Chris Wright reports.

HSBC’s decision to tell the world in advance when it is will carry out a large FX transaction to pay its non-dollar based shareholders their dividends is transparent. But is it wise?

It is a good job that investors don’t seem to be able to get enough of UK prime RMBS as the pipeline of such paper stood at more than £9 billion ($16.7 billion) towards the end of May. The new RMBS issuers poised to launch into this market (revealed in Euromoney’s April issue) were flexing their muscles mid-month, with Lloyds TSB confirming its RMBS programme and RBS first out of the gate with its £4.7 billion Arran Residential Mortgages Funding. The bank has decided not to set up a master trust but will have securitized £9.2 billion of UK mortgage risk via just two transactions in roughly six months when the deal closes. Arran Residential Mortgages, which accounts for half of the pipeline on its own, should get a rapturous reception, given how buyers responded to Standard Life’s latest Lothian issue, which achieved record tights for the sector with dollar-denominated triple-A paper placed at eight basis points over Libor. Later in the month Granite Mortgages saw triple-B risk sold at an eyewatering 47bp over Libor, which could go a long way to explaining the recent intense issuer interest in this sector.

Until recently, it seemed that the big FX players in FX were happy to leave the retail sector to aggregators, perhaps taking comfort from the prospect that once these had built up a decent size position they would see the business anyway.

Is there too much capital trying to find a home?

Investors need to tread with caution as uncertainty surrounds the Federal Reserve’s next move.

Floating rate notes are typically a short-dated bank product traditionally aimed at other banks’ treasuries. Is this the start of a new trend?

The ability of the CDO bid to distort the wider capital markets is significant – and growing.

Funds may take the chance to rebalance but don’t expect a crash.

At a time when M&A volumes are rising, a toughening up of the CFIUS could deter foreign companies looking to buy in the US. And that would take a serious chunk out of Wall Street’s fees. Kathryn Tully reports.

Quasi-independent debt management offices are bringing new sophistication to government debt management. But de-risking government balance sheets that have so far failed to account properly for contingent liabilities may be beyond them. Peter Lee reports.

The ballooning demand for mortgage credit in Spain is attracting new players and more flexible products.

After years of unfulfilled promise, there is the whiff of optimism in Indonesia as government tackles tangled economic and political challenges. Euromoney spoke to Indonesia’s finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, about problems, progress and promise. Chris Leahy reports.

Japanese government-guaranteed issuers such as DBJ and JBIC have been among the largest issuers of debt from Japan. With reform of these agencies in the pipeline, what plans do they have for issuance as interest in the Japanese economy picks up?

Investors have welcomed Thailand’s largest IPO for years with open arms. The problem is that those investors are in Singapore, not Bangkok. The failure to list one of the kingdom’s prize assets at home is symptomatic of much larger problems in the country. Chris Leahy reports.

Banks in the Philippines are set for more consolidation as new regulations threaten weaker lenders in a fragmented market. High valuations have dissuaded some from deals, but economic recovery might force them to reconsider. Chris Leahy reports.

Although banks have been leading securitization developments so far in Russia, the monopoly railroad infrastructure provider has come to market with the country’s first transaction backed by lease receivables. Kathryn Wells reports.

Why the European government bond markets have failed...and what the European Union would like to do about it

Funds are circumventing anti-concentration regulations with single-stock futures.

Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister, says her political coalition is committed to a programme of privatization and economic reform if a representative of her team assumes the top job in the country’s next government.

Andy Abrahams, you’re rubbish...

Of the 8,000 or so hedge funds globally, around 97% are focused on the US and European capital markets. And although opportunities in Asia, Latin America, and central and eastern Europe are being recognized, with the net amount of money flowing into hedge funds that focus on emerging-market investments rising 13% in 2005 according to Hedge Fund Research, not many investors are sufficiently confident to invest in these regions separately.

KBC Alternative Investment Management has suffered redemptions in its hedge fund assets that reportedly amount to 80%. The Belgian bank says the redemptions were made predominantly in 2005 by large institutional investors that were “no longer entirely satisfied with the performance of the hedge funds they had invested in, and decided to move out of convertible arbitrage and other relative value arbitrage strategies”. It says that the alternatives business had €2 billion in assets at the end of last year.

Anthony DeChellis The head of UBS’s private wealth management team in the US is joining rival Credit Suisse to head its private banking operations for the Americas. Credit Suisse has made clear it intends to focus aggressively on building its wealth management offering in the US.

General prosecutor to appeal not guilty verdict against Ulan Sarbanov.

Overvalued IPOs give cause for concern. Some bankers are becoming wary of damaging their reputation with rushed or over-valued Russian IPOs. Two banks dropped out of a deal last month and some analysts urge that caution be exercised in further IPOs.

Troubled emerging markets companies could soon benefit from the development of sophisticated bespoke deals aimed at increasing investor confidence.

US inflation fears spooked nervous markets this May, causing the biggest one-day falls in years. In the space of a week, the Nasdaq Composite Index and the FTSE 100 gave up their entire gains for the year. Both indices shed about 7%. Markets took fright at the larger-than-expected 0.6% rise in April’s US consumer prices, which also spilled over into commodities markets. Although many think the sell-off has been exaggerated, May’s Merrill Lynch’s Global Fund Manager Survey shows growing pessimism about inflation and corporate profits. The survey shows a sharp increase in the percentage of fund managers who expect a rise in core inflation, to 64% from 47% a month earlier. A net 9% of fund managers also expect corporate profits to deteriorate while a net 27% except operating margins to deteriorate. Nevertheless, half the sectors in the S&P500 have been posting double-digit earnings growth. Despite the uninspiring outlook for equities, bonds are still looking overvalued to a net 48% of respondents while equities by contrast are still looking underpriced to a net 3% of investors.

...While Wax wows them

Russian firms seek investor-friendly foreign talent; investor-friendly foreign talent seek large bonuses.

Merrill Lynch has upgraded Tunisia to overweight in response to the government’s announcement of a $1.56 billion debt management programme to be funded by the privatization of Tunisie Telecom. The bank believes this active approach will help bond prices, and categorizes Tunisia as a defensive asset at a time when the global emerging markets outlook is unsteady.