Country risk: Barbados and Jamaica offer alternatives to South American turmoil
Calmer waters may encourage investors to take a dip in the Caribbean Euromoney’s latest country risk survey signalled a positive mood shift towards Caribbean sovereign borrowers in the third quarter of 2019, with upgraded risk scores for Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Dominican...
Egypt hopes to secure new IMF agreement by March, says finance minister
Egypt hopes to agree on a new IMF funding package by the end of March, and is on track to implement the structural reforms still needed to attract foreign investment, its minister of finance Mohamed Maait tells Euromoney. During informal...
The house always wins: how IPO banks are not threatened by direct listings
Would banks that have traditionally charged young companies hefty fees to arrange their IPOs lose out from a greater move towards direct listings with no primary capital raising? The question has been raised a few times in recent weeks, not least...
The impact of Hong Kong unrest on finance: not fear but inconvenience
Extra security: a police patrol at MTR station on the lookout for protesters A finance conference was canned in Hong Kong last week. It will be pushed back three months, and held in Macau instead. It wasn’t that anyone feared...
Lebanon can stave off default, says central bank governor
Lebanon’s emergency plans to stave off imminent default will have the full support of the Banque du Liban, its governor Riad Salamé told Euromoney at the IMF meetings in Washington on October 19. But real commitment to reform is needed...
Uzbekistan outlines path to banking sector reform
Uzbek policymakers have announced plans to clean up the balance sheets of the country’s largest banks as part of a drive to restructure and privatize the state-dominated sector. Nearly 30 years after the end of the Soviet Union, publicly owned...
McKinsey says one third of banks on the brink in a downturn
Banks are in an end-of-cycle slowdown from which a third of them may not emerge unless they revamp their models for a digital world – and emerging markets aren’t immune. This is the sobering conclusion of a new report from...
Airline-style alliances in banking look set to take off
A new digital platform linking banks’ business clients across Europe, Asia and the Americas shows the desire of lenders to forge partnerships in the absence of mergers that might otherwise increase their international scale. Though its official launch in early...
Goldman defends spending as CEO Solomon says he is looking long-term
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon With a few earnings calls now under his belt, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon tends to rasp his way through them as if he’s George C Scott playing General Patton. Reporting third-quarter earnings this week,...
Conservation finance: It is time to press on with sustainability
A focus on just three of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) would produce a domino effect that would see nearly all of the other goals reached, according to a paper put out by the University of Bath in September....