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February is the festive season for London's trading community; another record year for bonuses has the City festooned in bright new ties, sharply cut suits, and swaying to the sound of champagne corks. "You all look pretty well on it", commented Eddie George, governor of the Bank of England, in his opening address at the Euromoney international bond conference. That's hardly surprising when a top earner can have a bonus as high as eight times his salary. But the champagne-induced hangovers of celebrating traders are nothing compared with the headaches high bonuses are causing their managers.

It's not often that a league table for a major capital markets sector features firms like Wako Securities, Kokusai Securities and Caja de Madrid above Goldman Sachs. But the MTNWare bookrunner league table for the first two months of 1997 does. It's the league table, generated by Euromoney and Capital Data, that the whole market is arguing over: the table of MTN trades.

India's feeble coalition government is taking bold steps to reform its debt market. Just four months after opening up domestic corporate debt to foreign investors, it has let them into the government bond market.

Hoping to increase the transparency and execution quality of a marketplace long shrouded in controversy and scandal, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) implemented several new rules in the over-the-counter equity market known as Nasdaq. Although the changes have been in the works for several years, last year's Justice Department price-fixing case against 24 major Nasdaq market makers pushed the SEC to act this January. Apparently unrepentant about the disrepute surrounding their market, leading firms are already grumbling about the new rules.

Has spy novelist Len Deighton heard of the merger that the rest of us have missed? In his latest book, Charity, the main character, Bernard Samson, meets "a mergers and acquisitions man from Deutsche Morgan Stanley" in Berlin.

You won't see these options being traded on the floor at Liffe, but Shahram Nikpour at Bossard Consultants thinks that options on information technology firms are already hot property.

In his 18 months running the World Bank, James Wolfensohn has earned a reputation as something of a straight talker. Feeling the heat is Chilean electric utility Endesa. Wolfensohn has accused it of failing to fulfil environmental obligations that were part of an IFC loan for a hydroelectric plant on the Bio Bio river, 400 kilometres south of Santiago.

The European Monetary Institute has finally confirmed the worst fears of supporters of European monetary union. At the start of a meeting with clients, Paul Mercier, head of financial markets at the EMI, said to them: "I want to be as open as I possibly can there will be a delay in monetary union."

Exotics enter the mainstream

Something very strange is happening with the world economy.

Country Risk: Switzerland takes a tumble

Wall Street's best-kept secret