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Asian brokers: The old hands fight back

Federal Reserve Bank of New York,

If the terms for accessing Target - the proposed interbank payments system - are unfavourable, banks from countries outside Emu might decide to forget about the official euro markets and create a Euro-euro market.

Flexibility of staff, good systems and local knowledge will decide which banks will emerge as winners from Emu. John Leonard's tips include Deutsche Bank, ABN-Amro, Den Danske Bank, Barclays, Santander and Allied Irish.

"We don't like the word 'war', we prefer to call it 'competition'," says Jörg Franke, board member of Deutsche Börse, the holding company for the German futures exchange (Deutsche Terminbörse - DTB). He's referring to a belligerent comment back in March by Liffe chairman Daniel Hodson about the rivalry between the London financial futures exchange and its German counterpart.

It's always helpful to find a scapegoat when things go wrong. Scapegoat hunters in Thailand think they have found one - or rather two. A pair of ceremonial wooden elephants were installed outside the ministry of finance, only a few weeks before the country was rocked by the resignation of two finance ministers and the collapse of the baht. Coincidence? Not according to those who remember that they used to be there, until they were removed in 1990 because of their allegedly inauspicious influence. Can we expect more violence to the baht until whoever put them there has the good sense to remove them? RM

Why tinker with international currency speculation by throwing sand in its wheels, when you can block its path completely with a big boulder? That's the view of Paul Davidson, professor of political economy at the University of Tennessee. A 1% round-trip Tobin tax (after Nobel laureate James Tobin) discourages only the small-time short-term speculators. It needs a radical overhaul of the relationship between currencies and economies to end damaging medium-term attacks, Davidson says.

In a year when the Dow and the S&P are both up more than 24% by mid-July and the Nasdaq Composite rose 31% in the second quarter alone, it's not difficult for a US fund manager to post impressive returns.

Nick Leeson, the man behind the Barings disaster, is still attracting controversy despite his sojourn at Tanah Merah jail, Singapore. Two rival films on the bank's downfall are set to hit the public some time in 1998, one a BBC drama, the other a feature film based on Leeson's book, Rogue Trader.

So much attention is being paid to reforming America's strict banking laws these days that few seem to spare a thought for the committees at the House of Representatives which have to decide on the issue.

The recent news that Cherokee, an entertainment company, was listing on Ofex - which stands for off-exchange - was greeted in the City of London with smirks and raised eyebrows.

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