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Antipathy between the Inter-American Development Bank's biggest shareholders -Brazil and the US - is long-standing. But when Brazil faced financial ruin they struck a new deal: the IDB can now fund IMF-style emergency lending programmes, and turn its soft-currency reserves into concessionary loans. But the bank's smaller members resent how the deal was done, and it has stoked up political and ideological differences among the staff. Brian Caplen reports.

Bankers might be forgiven for thinking that when lawyers get their teeth into a juicy case they make it run and run. But, warns Christopher Stoakes, we have still to hear the last of the swaps cases

Michael Hughes spent 16 years in the trading rooms of the City. He worked for Samuel Montagu, Kidder Peabody and Amro Bank. Made redundant some 10 years ago he now runs a holiday business on the Pembrokeshire coast.

Euroland Municipal Bonds: New city states

"Clear your desk!" They're terrifying words in most offices. But if you work for ABN Amro, fear not. It's just part of the bank's "clean desk campaign".

After months of frustration, the foreign banks negotiating repayment of Russian debt are as divided among themselves as they are against the Russian government. Deutsche Bank's decision to accept the latest offer while leading a 19-bank committee still fighting over terms has caused uproar. Individual banks now have to decide whether to follow Deutsche's example or take legal action in a last-ditch attempt to recover some of the $40 billion in rouble debt on which the government defaulted last August. Jack Dyson reports.

With non-performing loans at some Thai banks running at horrifying rates, it's perhaps understandable that tough collection methods are needed, but isn't hiring martial arts experts a step too far?

Olivetti's bid for Telecom Italia will prove a watershed in European corporate finance whether it succeeds or not. First, it shows that the orgy of shareholder value-linked corporate restructuring promised by proponents of the euro will happen, and faster than anyone predicted. Second, it is proof that, however much Europeans may try to prevent it, what happens in the US eventually happens in Europe. This is an unprecedented hostile leveraged bid. At a stroke every European corporation has been forced to acknowledge that it is in play. And at a stroke it has created a US-style environment for investment banks, their corporate advisory teams and the leveraged lenders. Right now all over the eurozone corporations are hiring investment banks to explore defences and acquisitions of their own.

Talking of Deutsche Bank, when the twin towers give up on Russia it's time to take stock. The bank has had a relationship with the country for a century and more - a relationship someone senior in Frankfurt must think worth preserving at the expense of almost total write-off. But should the bank have caved in? After all, the Russians have generally shown no willingness to accept that the default by a former superpower on its government debt is a serious matter.

A shiver went through the international markets in February. The disaster in Russia entered a new phase as Unexim, the country's fourth-largest bank by assets, defaulted on its Eurobonds - bonds that are usually held sacrosanct.

Behind the thriving anarchy of China's coastline there's an industrial hinterland that is depressed, debt-ridden and still largely state-controlled. Few bosses of the state-owned enterprises there have the power to cut their workforce or pay bonuses. Even if they do, the state-owned banks are keeping them and the competition on life-support. Overcapacity, pollution and poverty are omnipresent, part-mitigated by the huge Three Gorges Dam project, which employs 25,000 people and will displace two million. Euromoney's Steven Irvine followed investment scout Richard Tsiang into the interior to see China's true economic heartland - a textile company that raise pigs, a salt plant with its eyes on a broadcast-equipment producer and a television factory that wants to give away its products

Investors converge on Hungary