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A number of past financial crises have had their roots in countries pegging their currency to the U.S. dollar. The Thai baht was at the epicenter of the Asian Crisis of 1997/98. Argentina's hyperinflation of 2001/2 was also caused by a disastrous currency peg. Today there is not much left of that policy, but there are two notable exceptions and they are two of the most important currencies in Southeast Asia, the Singapore dollar (FXSG) and the Hong Kong dollar.

While their pegs are different in n

Vietnam's central bank cut interest rates again last week as inflation slowed, joining central banks from Sri Lanka and Australia to the ECB in easing monetary policy. It is seeking to spur lending and boost consumption after having to rein in a credit boom that has slowed economic growth to a 13-year low. But with the announcement that the Prime Minister's office had given its approval for the creation of the Vietnam Asset Management Company - a Vietnamese version of the Resolution Trust Co. us

In Asia, REITs are gaining popularity because both Singapore and Hong Kong have performed very well in recent years as recipients of real estate investors from markets such as China, the Philippines and Indonesia due in large part of central bank policy which target the U.S. dollar directly in the case of Hong Kong, or U.S. interest rate policy, in the case of Singapore.

REITs continue to attract investors because their dividends are more appealing than other investment opportunities in the curre

The average tier one investment bank today is dealing with a very complex trade processing infrastructure.  You’d expect the infrastructure to resemble a high speed rail line fully optimised to deliver trades from execution venue to settlement in the shortest possible time. The reality is that most banks are dealing with multiple branch lines, sidings and frequent level crossings which all serve to provide significant obstacles to the journey of the average trade. 

It is not unusual for trades to

Increasingly, organizations across all industries are charged with managing risk in a complicated compliance environment. Over at the Credit Union Times, Danny Baker, Vice President of Product Management, Risk & Compliance at Fiserv Inc., thinks he’s found a solution in the Cloud. In his recent article, “To the Cloud for Risk Management, Performance Analysis,” he argues that Credit Unions should turn to “Web-based or cloud portal” platforms that deliver enterprise risk management solutions.

Clou

As domestic and international trade continue to grow, companies are starting to consider the benefits of alternative sources of trade financing, according to David Hu, Managing Partner, IIG Trade Finance LLC.

“The cost of capital for banks, the traditional providers of trade finance, has increased tremendously. They also have other issues, such as the setting of LIBOR, which is being questioned right now. With the increasingly tighter capital requirements of Basel III, banks will have to tighten

My piece on Dodd-Frank and Title I and II in Bank Think section of American Banker. http://bit.ly/Zt3YnN

Risk Leadership: My Must Dos for Business Continuity Management

Thanks to Rita for getting me moving on a Business Continuity article.  A topic I have neglected in this newsletter for quite some time.  Perhaps it is because I feel Business Continuity Management (BCM) as a discipline has developed nicely over the past couple of decades and most practitioners don’t need too many tips in this area. 

Once I got thinking about it and had a chat to another of my readers (thanks Greg) it made me realise

According to The Economist algorithmic trading and high-frequency trading (HFT), virtually unknown until about six years ago, now account for almost 70% of the flow of orders on the main exchanges. Since the introduction of electronic trading there has always been more advanced solutions breaking through to help traders gain a competitive advantage. In today’s fast paced environment, however, HFT has the speedy edge. Can we level the playing field for traders working manually?

Regulators have alw

Like the single European currency and the Channel Tunnel, another ‘euro fantasy’ is now reality. T2S (TARGET2-Securities) is ambitious: a new, bespoke technology solution providing a best-of-breed settlement model. It will handle a substantial portion of European transaction volumes, transferring securities against payment across many different geographies.

We have seen a series of cross-border mergers of market infrastructures, creating the conditions for the development of a single clearing and

With Health Insurance and Healthcare costs continuing to skyrocket and access to trained Doctors decreasing, something needs to change.  The current system is expensive, wasteful, and inefficient.  We are proposing a new Gatekeeper Model that will provide Employees greater access to Doctors at a fraction of the cost with far better outcomes.

The Traditional Gatekeeper Model for Healthcare?

What was the traditional Healthcare Gatekeeper Model?  The Alliance for Health Reform guidebook defines the g

The potential foreign reach of the CFTC's derivatives rules is one of the most contentious issued in derivatives markets reform.  Read more here.

Dodd-Frank and Extraterritoriality

Most agree that working from the top down, meaning to first identify corporate objectives, then focus on the details of how to achieve them is what most managers wish they could be doing more of. However, the reality is most managers are so busy with day-to-day activities that little time is left over to work on the big picture. Everyone agrees the role of ERM is for risk management to be involved in the “key business decisions,” however, some misinterpret this as interviewing only the senior ex

Karim Taleb, Managing Partner of Robust Methods, kindly provided this whitepaper on the Federal Reserve and money creation, and its effects on the S&P 500.

Download the whitepaper here.

“The effects of the Federal Reserve’s on-going policy of artificial money creation are well documented by now… Given that price levels reflect a relative abundance or scarcity of a certain supply against a certain demand, an increase in the supply of money against a fixed amount of shares in the equity indexes natu