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Michael von Clemm, former chairman of CSFB and Merrill Lynch Capital Markets, died on November 6 at the age of 62.

They are two of Asia's premier fixed-income investors. They are also former investment bankers. Euromoney invited Brian Lippey of Tokai Asia and Albert Cobetto of Prudential Asia to dinner to chat about dressing down in Hong Kong, how it feels to switch to the buy side and which houses have survived the stock market crisis best. Steven Irvine poured the wine and asked the questions.

The world is facing its worst economic crisis since the 1930s and no-one has a solution to the problems, least of all the IMF.

After the emerging-markets crisis, which countries remain creditworthy?

Investing in the Indian capital market is sometimes called the great paper chase. Share certificates come in tiny lots of 50 to 100 shares, clean deliveries are uncertain and the process of transfer can take up to a year at the end of which an investor may discover that his shares are fake, stolen or lost.

The pack of acquisitive admirers circling around Patria Finance, Prague's much respected investment-banking firm, is growing bigger. Komercni Banka, the Czech Republic's biggest bank, made the first approach. Then came international investment banks, with Fleming and Merrill Lynch reputedly among them.

You ain't seen nothin' yet

It's a simple idea. You own most of a company so you control its fate. But this notion of shareholder value has been slow to reach continental Europe where governments often allow small groups of long-term shareholders to control public companies. Things are starting to change. Cross-border mergers - even hostile foreign bids - are becoming more common, debt-financed deals are supplanting stock swaps and companies are making big acquisitions using hybrid tradable loans. Michelle Celarier reports on the Americanization of European M&A.

"Why Walter?" asked even senior staff at Dresdner Bank when Bernhard Walter was designated as the bank's next chief executive. From outside German banking came a simpler query: "Who is Walter?" So far, Walter has made no attempt to shed light on either mystery.

Credit derivatives will transform the way banks manage their balance sheets. Once banks adopt a true portfolio approach, they will create a fully liquid secondary market in credit risk. Before then, demand for loans, asset swaps and credit derivatives will surge as proprietary traders and hedge funds cut up the credit curve. Mark Parsley reports.

A crinkle in the English law of security has been more or less ironed out - but don't ask for an opinion on it yet. By Christopher Stoakes.

Investors who bought shares in Ionica at £3.90 ($6.40) during the innovative UK telephone company's public flotation led by SBC Warburg Dillon Read in June, have soon regretted that decision. Just four months later in November, Ionica issued a warning of a slowdown in sales. It announced a first-half loss of £77.2 million. Worryingly, problems of insufficient base station capacity, a delay in implementing a crucial software programme as well as the company's own imposition of new credit controls on customers, had together slowed its drive to sign up new paying subscribers. The news sent the share price tumbling to £1.56.