Wow – What a hyperbolical headline and opening sentence! Complete with what journalists call screamers – or exclamation marks for those who don’t know.

I was off to the GL Net Forum in London on Tuesday.

In the wake of the August 1998 financial crisis, Russia’s regions became a banking wasteland.

While banks look to clean up in green finance, they face one competitor that could trump them all – General Electric.

The optimization of working capital is the treasurer’s crucial concern – all the more so as rates rise and credit conditions tighten.

Serbia’s equity market has spent most of the year firmly in positive territory.

China Development Bank’s deal with Barclays Bank, which might involve the state-owned lender investing up to $11.6 billion in the UK bank, and China Investment Corporation’s $3 billion subscription for shares in the IPO of private equity firm Blackstone, have increased speculation as to what moves China’s largest lenders might make next and what the targets might be.

NBG, Greece’s largest bank, is doing well out of a domestic growth surge but has recognized the need to find the fastest-growing, most profitable parts of the market.

For every investment banker there is one deal that stands out in their career.

After every great party comes a reckoning.

This is a week in which some of the brightest, best educated, most eloquent – who can normally argue three different and contradictory positions at once on the economy, the markets and their own industry – discover that they've somehow lost track of how the new financial markets work.

"It was PIKs and toggles," he rolls his eyes, as if someone else had forced him to do this deal or cheekily agreed it in his name.

Vladimir Evtushenkov, the chairman of Russian conglomerate Sistema, describes his company’s focus as consumer services but is tight-lipped about what that means.

In emerging markets fixed income, three investors have raised themselves to superstar status.

For reporters on the call, Goldman CFO Viniar unwittingly supplies the headline: 'This is not a rescue'.

Companies from central and eastern European countries already in the European Union have adopted an increasingly aggressive strategy of making acquisitions in their faster-growing non-EU neighbours.

Indonesian companies have chosen to fund their businesses in esoteric ways, and that may be at the expense of developing a mature equity market.

When the investment trust structure appeared four years ago, the securitization market jerked into action and local banks jumped on a growing opportunity.

While one country goes from strength to strength, the rest of Latin America is seeing very slow growth in funds.

Against the background of falling oil revenues and an ambitious five-year plan, Syria is taking its first steps towards a more liberal economy.

Not necessarily the largest or richest, but these are a few of the family-owned groups that dominate the Gulf.

"If Moscow is the centre of Russia, then the south is the pearl." That’s the mantra that Vasily Vysokov, chairman of Bank Center-Invest, likes to chant about the Krasnodar Krai federal district where his bank is the pre-eminent private sector player.

Peru’s economic miracle has taken it to the threshold of investment-grade status and enthused the country’s local and foreign bankers, who are rapidly broadening their corporate and retail markets.

"Servicing is facing all sorts of challenges that previously it really did not have to deal with before"

With successful IPOs completed and the domestic economy humming, China’s banks have never been in better shape to venture overseas, and there are compelling reasons to do so.

We've got hedge funds who are saying, 'Look, we have been in business for ten years and we've paid $500 million in fees and commissions to Wall Street and you can't give us a couple of days?' We are getting a lot of blunt decisions made by people far away from these markets and some of them are bad decisions.

Banks have come to realize that to make money from emissions trading markets they would do well to tie up with the consultants that understand the technicalities and with the corporates that own Clean Development Mechanism schemes.

Saudi Arabia’s 2004 Capital Markets Law has brought something of a fresh start to all investment banks in the kingdom, whatever their size.

There seems little doubt that the first meaningful moves outside China by state lenders are likely to take place in Hong Kong.

Uday Kotak is India’s most successful self-made banker.

A growing social conscience about the environment has opened up new technologies and markets that offer hedge funds new areas in which to find alpha.

Jones Lang LaSalle, this year's winner of the Euromoney/Liquid real estate poll, is expanding with the global real estate markets.

In Russia, members of the business elite are just as likely to appear in the gossip columns as they are in the business sections of the nation’s newspapers.

From Cuba to Zimbabwe, and from Iraq to Sudan, London-based securities firm Exotix has taken the esoteric markets label and made it its own.

Global warming is the biggest issue facing society.

Naguib Sawiris, the chairman of Orascom Telecom, has established an emerging market operation that is one of the world’s strongest-performing companies.

The Brazilian has brought a sense of euphoria back to the country and established it one of the four key emerging nations, as part of the Bric group.

No one doubts that China’s banks will make acquisitions abroad.

To build Las Vegas on the Baltic: that’s the underlying aim of the Amber Shore of Russia resort-recreation complex, which besides the requisite gambling facilities will include sports, spa and therapeutic centres, an aqua park, shopping malls and hotel complexes, and a range of upscale housing developments, alongside the inevitable golf course development.

Often accused of being unwilling to make use of cutting-edge investment techniques, Japanese institutions are more and more attracted to the heady mix of strong ratings and high yields offered by structured credit.

The governor of Sama has led the Saudi economy through a turbulent but ultimately prosperous period during an unprecedented term of almost 25 years.

Despite the fallout from US sub-prime woes, analysts are optimistic about prospects for the global economy, as commodities remain strong.

UBS may want to forget much of this year following the closure of its hedge fund, the departure of senior personnel and a profits warning for the second half of the year.

Baffled at first by the unwonted benevolence of the clean development mechanism, Chinese enterprises rapidly jumped on the carbon trading bandwagon.

The industrial town of Taiyuan doesn’t look much of a place for landmarks.

Northern Rock’s inability to tap the wholesale funding market is a body blow for the whole sector.

Three years ago Khazanah, Malaysia’s state investment body, was instructed to become activist, holding on to most of the state’s corporate holdings rather than privatizing them, and setting tight performance targets.

Lots of people want to claim credit for what happened with TXU – the company itself, the private equity firms that bought it, the banks that advised both of the parties, the NGOs that lobbied intensively against it, and the Texas state regulators that threatened to scupper TXU’s business plan.

Russia’s flourishing mortgage market is the next big opportunity for the country’s securitization market.

Market forces have the best chance of driving significant actions that will boost climate change.

The spate of new privately owned banks will soon be joined by specialist Islamic banks, which by all accounts can look forward to a flying start in the pristine Syrian market.

Serbia’s minister of the economy and former finance minister is uncompromising – and his approach has been crucial to the revival of his country’s economic fortunes.

Man is the world’s largest hedge fund group, with more than $65 billion in assets.

Africa’s abundant mineral resources are attracting investment from Russian companies.

Kazakhstan’s economic boom has transformed the country into the undisputed economic leader in central Asia.

When market turn sour the investment banking industry has a nice line in gallows humour.

Sinan Al-Shabibi, governor of the Central Bank of Iraq, speaks to Sudip Roy about the bank’s efforts to control inflation, curb exchange rate instability and cope with the difficult security situation.

Mohammad-Jafaar Mojarrad, deputy governor of the Central Bank of Iran, speaks to Mark Johnson about the bank’s efforts to control inflation, curb exchange rate instability and cope with the difficult security situation.

Africa is the last frontier.

Families have always dominated the economies of the Gulf, controlling huge amounts of wealth and influence but traditionally unwilling to open up their capital – and their books – to the outside world.

The disappearance of both CP investors and ABS buyers in August had grave consequences for those vehicles that rely on both.

Al Gore, the former vice-president of the US, is the most high-profile figure in the fight to force action to combat global warming.

Most of the world’s largest financial institutions are trying to use their contacts with key stakeholders across business, academic and government lines to brainstorm the best ways that markets can combat climate change.

The turnaround of Malaysia Airlines has few parallels anywhere in the world, never mind in Malaysia.

The consensus among structured credit bankers in Tokyo seemed to be that the local market’s reaction to the US sub-prime mortgage crisis was initially more dramatic than it needed to be.

After an absence of almost half a century, private-sector banks are once again doing business in Syria.

With high profits, a low and declining cost/income ratio and an expansive global strategy, BBVA ought to be riding high in the stock markets.

In August the markets rocked and, in turn, Argentina was dumped.

The insurance sector in Syria is emerging from almost half a century of state monopoly and is still in a nascent state that offers both attractions and risks to the first new wave of private firms.

The liquidity crisis that blew up out of the sub-prime credit downturn reveals big gaps in understanding between senior managers at banks and the credit structurers.

UNTIL RECENTLY, INDIA occupied a hazy part of the average global investment banking CEO’s brain marked "untapped potential".

In the week of August 13 participants in the financial markets – credit traders, equity investors, heads of repo desks, hedge fund managers, risk controllers, originators and capital markets bankers, credit strategists, treasurers, chief financial officers – began to lose faith in the financial system itself.

Net jumbo Pfandbrief issuance is likely be down again this year for the third year running, while structured covered bond issuance grows apace.

"It's really troubled.

Former US vice president Al Gore praises commitment of financial institutions to find solutions to global warming in exclusive interview with Euromoney.

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Tulletts, which was the first money broker I ever heard of.

I was forwarded an e-mail that a somewhat naïve salesman at a major bank sent out to clients this week.

In a landmark decision, the Federal Court of Australia has held that the law will enable an investment bank to contract out of, or modify, any fiduciary obligations owed to a client.

The credit crunch has one firm lesson for lawyers: investors need better advice on structured finance.

The emerging global asset class • Anatomy of a deal • Maturity brings sophistication • Start at the exit • Credit rules • New markets, proven approaches • Five years leading from the front