January 2009

THE NEW PROTECTIONISTS As countries seek to safeguard their economies from the effects of the global downturn, they risk being accused of protectionism. The fall-out could be ugly.   When US president-elect Barack Obama sailed to victory in the November ...

BEST FX PROVIDERS Global Finance selects the leaders in the world’s biggest financial market.   The foreign exchange market has continued to thrive throughout the global financial crisis, providing some welcome profits for beleaguered financial institutions. Average daily turnover has ...

NEWS     Actis, a leading private equity investor in emerging markets, has successfully raised $2.9 billion for investment in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This is one of the largest dedicated EM private equity funds closed in 2008. The ...

DR NEWS         Companies based in Brazil, Russia, India and China, known as the BRIC countries, accounted for 53% of new depositary receipt programs and 52% of capital raised in DR form in the first 11 months ...

BRAZIL       Presidents Medvedev and Lula call for the first-ever BRIC summit. Eager to maintain its status as Latin America’s largest financial institution, Banco do Brasil, Brazil’s largest state-controlled bank, announced the acquisition of Nossa Caixa, a bank ...

INDIA     Building hope: One of the few brights spots in the Indian economy, real estate still attracts investors. Leading Indian manufacturers have dismissed the Indian government’s $4 billion stimulus package as insufficient. The Federation of Indian Chambers of ...

UNILEVER CLEANS UP ACT OVER PALM OIL     Unilever Indonesia recently opened a factory for skin-care products in Cikarang, West Java. The factory joins seven others operated by Unilever in the country, where Lever Brothers opened a soap factory ...

China     Treasury secretary Paulson and Chinese president Hu vow to fight protectionism. China has increased export tax rebates and depreciated the value of the yuan relative to the US dollar in recent weeks, prompting fears that protectionist pressures ...

RUSSIA     Defending his legacy: Putin spends his way out of financial crisis. The Russian economy continued to slide down a slippery slope of economic crisis as a series of adjustments to the trading corridor of the ruble reflected ...

Africa     Africa's airlines are looking to tap new credit lines. The Central Bank of Nigeria issued guidelines for establishing and operating credit bureaus, in a move that will support the development of the country’s credit market by providing ...

MIDDLE EAST     Trouble in paradise: Dubai feels the chill of a global recession. Property prices on Dubai’s upscale Palm Jumeirah, an artificial island shaped like a palm tree, fell sharply late last year. Construction work on the Trump ...

  Policymakers in Taiwan are pulling out all the stops in their response to the global economic slump.     Taiwan's president Ma Ying-jeou: Promoting better relations with China.   Taiwan is an economic success story. The island, despite political ...

GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS     Bernanke: Has slashed Fed rate to record lows. Central banks around the world dug deeply into their ammunition dumps and unleashed a volley of outsized rate cuts in December, hoping to keep their economies from ...

UNITED STATES     Greening finance: Social and environmental ethics will form part of business curriculums. A burgeoning global movement to reshape corporate behavior by weaving corporate social responsibility principles into business school teaching got a boost last month. At ...

Brazil       Not so sweet: Predicted demand for Brazil's ethanol is falling. Just a year after Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, predicted Brazil would triple its annual ethanol output to around 70 billion liters by 2020, the market ...

GLOBAL EQUITY /DRS     More than 1,000 unsponsored American depositary receipt programs were created in the last three months of 2008, in many cases without the permission of the companies whose shares are being traded in the US over-the-counter ...

CORPORATE DEBT     A combination of heavy supply and rising defaults makes it difficult to forecast a bottom for the credit markets in 2009, analysts say. The new-issue market in US high-yield bonds remained frozen solid late last year, ...

MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS     * Figures may not add up, as more than one bank typically obtains credit for any one transaction.   Merger and acquisition activity in the middle market, which had held up relatively well in the ...

FOREIGN EXCHANGE     A persistent shortage of dollars in global money markets is helping to bolster the greenback, even as US economic data portray an economy that is mired in recession, currency analysts say. The dollar continues to benefit ...

Ecuador     Correa: Buying political capital with debt restructuring. Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa has made good on his 2006 presidential campaign promise to default on any foreign debt deemed illegitimate, defaulting on $3.9 billion in global bonds. This marks ...

United States     Marenzi: Interbank lending assertions are puzzling. A chorus of dissenting voices has emerged that is challenging the widely held belief that interbank lending markets have dried up, commercial lending is being curtailed, and non-financial commercial paper ...

SPONSORED ROUNDTABLE   With credit conditions tightening around the world, businesses are focusing more than ever on effective liquidity management. Global Finance brought together some of the leaders in the treasury and cash management field to discuss current trends and ...