Global news and insight for corporate financial professionals
LESSONS FROM EUROPE Corporate comprehension of the benefits of going green is far more advanced in Europe than in the US. But America’s businesses could easily catch up. Stark differences: Europe and the US have taken very different ...
GREEN FINANCE Despite the drumbeat of headlines about the troubled banking and finance industries, one area is coming up green. With global financial markets languishing in the doldrums, “green financing” is emerging as a key lever ...
SPOTLIGHT / GLOBAL CUSTODY Global custodians are experiencing strong growth and increasingly complex demands from their clients. Propelled by the growth in increasingly sophisticated financial instruments and the emergence of new markets and clients, the universe of financial assets ...
REGIONAL REPORT / CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE They dodged the early fallout from the credit crunch, but Central and Eastern Europe’s economies are facing growing challenges. All change: Central and Eastern Europes economies are in transition. Next year Europe’s ...
CARIBBEAN FINANCE CENTERS Recent changes are helping the venerable finance centers of the Caribbean stave off increasingly intense international competition. Partly in response to the US-led assault on their opaque banking systems and propensity ...
CORPORATE TOOLBOX / POLITICAL RISK In recent years, political risks facing multinationals have grown more significant. Corporations are far from blameless in creating that risk, though. Heightened tensions: Multinationals in countries such as Venezuela face growing risks. With ...
In the first of a two-part series, Global Finance identifies the best online corporate and consumer banks by country and regionally by product or service category. Times have been hard recently for banks’ information technology departments. The collapse of ...
ANNUAL SURVEY The past 12 months have been some of the most difficult ever for investment banks, but many institutions continue to provide outstanding services to their clients. Investment banks are still writing ...
BRAZIL Digging in: Brazilian miner Vale is investing heavily. After several years of steady profit growth, Brazil’s banking sector reported a slowdown in second-quarter 2008. Bradesco, Brazil’s largest non-state bank by assets, posted a 13% drop in second-quarter ...
China opened the 29th Olympic Summer Games in Beijing on August 8 with a ceremony incorporating 15,000 performers and 29,000 fireworks shells and attended by US president George Bush, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and other world leaders. China spent a ...
INDIA Manmohan Singh: Has more scope to enact reforms. India’s ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) led by Manmohan Singh, survived a vote of no confidence in late July after the three communist parties in parliament said ...
CHINA’S AUTO MARKET REMAINS IN FAST LANE COMPANY TO WATCH China’s love affair with the automobile shows no sign of cooling. The world’s most populous country is also the fastest-growing new-car market, with sales increasing at a rate ...
NEWS FTSE Group has extended its Global Equity Index Series to include 23 frontier markets, including such countries as Bangladesh, Botswana, Tunisia and Vietnam. “Frontier equity markets today represent more than $1 trillion in capitalization and are becoming ...
MIDDLE EAST Bright future: NYSE deal boosts Doha market. General Electric of the United States has formed an $8 billion joint venture with Mubadala Development, a sovereign wealth fund based in Abu Dhabi, to invest in emerging markets ...
DR NEWS The amount of capital raised in initial public offerings of companies tapping global markets through the issuance of depositary receipts fell 79% in the first half of 2008 to $3.6 billion, according to a report by ...
RUSSIA Headline risk in Russia returned with a vengeance over the summer as global oil major BP struggled with its Russian partners over control of its TNK-BP oil company joint venture. After an extended battle, the head of ...
AFRICA All change: Zimbabwe's coins have value again. With hyperinflation eroding the nation’s economy, Zimbabwe’s government is taking desperate measures. It lopped off 10 zeros from the Zimbabwe dollar, as inflation is now running at 2.2 million percent ...
TREASURY & CASH MANAGEMENT 2008 Robert Allen Group Treasurer British American Tobacco Robert Allen, appointed group treasurer effective this past June, replaces David Swann, who has now retired. Based in London, Allen works with a team of 20 professionals ...
ELECTRONIC INVOICING Watkinson: RBS has created an open e-invoicing solution in an attempt to make it user-friendly for customers. At the height of the dot-com boom, anyone attending the multitude of technology summits touting the next big “disruptive technology” ...
BANK RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT How banks treat their customers through the current hard times will define their relationships for years to come. Moinian warns corporates to be cautious: "Banks in trouble are offering extremely good rates". A wave of ...
LIQUIDITY MANAGEMENT Corporate treasurers are fully reviewing all of their liquidity structures and relationships to ensure maximum efficiency, best access to credit and best returns on excess cash. Rossi: We have seen a number of our large corporate ...
The old adage, “Cash is king,” has rarely been more true. As banks reassess their credit relationships with corporate customers, with a view to maintaining those relationships that are more profitable and less risky, corporates, particularly those in tiers 2 ...
EUROPE Blowout: EDP Renováveis' stock tumbled more than 20% after its IPO With equity capital markets bankers in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market focused on massive rights issues to recapitalize their peers in recent months, ...
GLOBAL Almost a year into the credit crunch, it appears that there are still widespread market fears of another financial firm going under. And it seems that the next six months are crucial in terms of ...
ARGENTINA Don't cry for me: Kirchner's woes deepen as inflation accelerates. While Peru and Brazil crossed the investment-grade threshold this year, Argentina is moving in the opposite direction. Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded Argentina’s foreign and local long-term ...
GEORGIA Few in the oil industry doubt that the Russia-Georgia conflict is as much about tightening the squeeze on oil and gas supply to the West as it is about protecting minorities in South Ossetia and ...
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS Midland, Michigan-based Dow Chemical forged an unusual alliance of bankers and investors to finance its $18.6 billion acquisition of specialty-chemicals maker Rohm and Haas. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the Kuwait Investment Authority, a sovereign ...
GLOBAL EQUITY/DRS Strange as it may seem, there have been bigger initial public offerings since the credit crunch hit, but fewer of them. Global IPO activity reached an all-time high of $287 billion in proceeds in 2007 but ...
FOREIGN EXCHANGE The dollar made strong and broad gains last month as commodity prices declined and economic data from Europe and Japan came in weaker than expected. Early signs of a global slowdown in real economic activity and falling oil ...
CORPORATE DEBT More than a year after the credit crunch burst onto the global stage, regulators and banks are still searching for a way to end the crisis, which appears to be morphing into a chronic condition. The ...
MEXICO Mexico's president Felipe Calderón is hoping Ruiz can help get the economy back on track. Faced with the fallout from the US economic slowdown, Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, appointed former businessman Gerardo Ruiz to the country’s top ...
UNITED STATES Kicking the habit: Shoppers slash spending. Will declining gasoline prices encourage American consumers to pile into the family automobile and head out to the mall? Retailers hope so, but signs were not encouraging as the key ...
UNITED KINGDOM Clark: Silo-based controls are at heart of problem. In light of the record £5.6 million ($10.5 million) fine the UK’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) imposed on the UK operations of Credit Suisse’s investment bank recently, observers ...
UNITED STATES High hopes: Schwab looks to trade agreements to bolster US economy. Following the collapse of the Doha Round of world trade talks this summer, the United States is pinning its hopes on new bilateral trade agreements ...
