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There is public and political pressure to keep out or at least regulate sovereign wealth funds. It must be resisted

I'm consistently surprised by how little the mainstream press understands securitisation. Admittedly it's not the easiest concept to get one's head around, with its alien terms and acronyms. What an SPV is, and where it is, can be hard to explain.

One of the reasons suggested for the latest bout of sterling weakness is the nationalization of Northern Rock. US investors in particular are said to have been spooked by the pictures of people queuing to withdraw their funds in panic when the crisis broke and now won’t touch UK assets with a bargepole. Given the US sub-prime mess, though, you have to wonder how sound their judgement is.

Saxo has extended the streaming of live option prices to its clients in the US after what it says has been a successful roll-out in Europe and Asia. The bank will offer 31 currency pairs, with maturities of one day to one year.

So Thomson Corporation’s takeover of Reuters has been rubberstamped by US and European regulators after the companies agreed to sell off some of their databases. The deal creates an absolutely huge data-vending and financial-information provider.

I was surprised at just how much press coverage there was last week when it came out that Global Trader Europe had effectively been holed below the waterline because of one client’s inability to meet a margin call. However, having been told from an exceptionally good source that the client was a character well known both to the market and the UK’s Financial Services Authority, I think I now understand why there was so much interest. So far, I haven’t seen the name published other than on a few bulletin boards, which have been swift to remove it.

Since I’ve been ranting – sorry, I mean offering my informed commentary about the wonderful world of FX – I like to think that I have helped improve the standard of puff and PR that is routinely sent out. But this week I got one of the worst press releases I’ve seen for some time about a retail platform that, “experienced the highest volumes of trading during January 2008 since its launch.” It went on to say, “nearly half of all trades executed during January...were Euro/USD transactions, compared to an average of 15% in the three months prior to August’s credit crunch of 2007.”

K Duker, who many years ago had the pleasure of managing me at Midland New York, has finally left Deutsche. He held numerous different positions at the bank over the course of many years. His last role was as head of dbFX, the bank’s retail platform, for Asia. Duker was instrumental in signing the deal with FXCM, the white-label partner that Deutsche never mentions.

Yuki Hashimoto has left her role as a managing director in FX sales at Credit Suisse in Tokyo. Hashimoto, who is very popular with clients, has joined Morgan Stanley as a managing director based in Hong Kong, where she will head up FX Sales for Asia-Pac, including Japan.

It appears to have been a relatively calm week in FX, which, as I’m in France trying to have a holiday, suits me. The calmness seems at odds with what is happening in the wider world.

Cannons to the left of us, cannons to the right. In this case sub-prime losses being revealed across Europe, not just the USA, and monolines in slow collapse.

2007 was a mixed year for Japan, with the stock market suffering from foreign investors uncertainty following the subprime crisis and the long-hoped for recovery of the economy still not fully underway. Falling share prices in the banking sector especially interfered with several high-profile merger plans, and shareholders in bank stocks and owners of securitisations all waited nervously to see if their assets would be hit by fallout from the US subprime loans problem. Nonetheless, there were many reasons for market participants to be cheerful as overall volumes of announced M&A and DCM activity increased, and some pioneering Japanese firms consolidated domestically or sought to expand overseas. Euromoney’s inaugural Japan deals of the year highlights the year’s outstanding deals, chosen because they were well-executed, because they were especially bold or unusual in concept, and because they exemplify expected trends in capital markets in the near future.