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Velvet costs are piling up

It's often said that Hong Kong moves faster than other places. And staff at Indosuez WI Carr can testify to just how quickly life can change. In the space of a week the firm went from all the bacchanalia associated with a bull market to huge job cuts.

If you're impressed with the inexplicably long hours your colleagues have been putting in over the past couple of months, ask them what they've been up to. They may be part of the growing number whiling away the small hours playing computer games such as Doom, a virtual-reality shoot-'em-up game of extreme violence.

With trillions of dollars of securities lent or temporarily sold each day the risks, once thought minimal, began to look higher in November. There's a rethink on counterparty risk and the practice of making a spread on lower-grade collateral, but the credit-spread business is growing. Michelle Celarier reports.

Interest rates and bond yields are up, the rouble is under pressure and money is flowing out of the country. But Russia could survive the crisis in better shape than other emerging markets. And, as Ronan Lyons reports, if it brings banking consolidation, greater fiscal maturity and a new breed of long-term foreign investors, so much the better

You read it here first. In May 1996 Euromoney quoted a normally well-informed source in Switzerland as follows: "Who do you think has been buying UBS shares for the past few weeks?" Swiss Bank Corporation, he says. "They're already merging, they're doing a dance together." Apparently they had been doing this dance since 1995.

Issuer: PT Makindo

Investment bankers' pay has been pushed through the roof as European firms seek to compete with Wall Street. But now banks are squeezing costs as they see their growth prospects fade. For all but the very best employees, the days of sky-high salaries may soon be over. So don't spend that seven-figure bonus all at once - it may be the last for some time. By Suzanne Miller.

And then there were three

Few bankers would include the fact that they were once a scout on their CV, "as a joke". But Peter Luthy is not, perhaps, an ordinary banker. A fit-looking and apparently easy-going 46, he gives off a convincing sense of having squeezed the most out of life. He spent two years in his early 20s working as an idealistic carpenter in New Jersey and another two in his late 30s as a wealthy non-worker, travelling the world with his milliner wife Candace and skiing wherever the opportunity arose - 100 days a year.

Asia's crisis brought bond issuance in central and eastern Europe to an abrupt halt. The region's issuers, tarred with the same brush as south-east Asia, have seen their spreads widen dramatically. So what will tempt investors back? And how long will it take? Robert Minto finds out.

Days before South African president Nelson Mandela lambasted "apartheid patterns of ownership" in a five hour speech to December's ANC congress, the final nails went into the coffin of South Africa's showpiece black empowerment deal.