The latest Top 1000 world banks listing shows that recovery is at hand. After the previous year’s dramatic 29.7% slide, total profits of the world’s leading banks were back up by 13.3% to $252.4bn. However, it is hardly a global trend, as much of this is attributable to great efforts by the US banks, which lifted profits by a staggering 25.7%, and lower Japanese bank losses. Elsewhere the performances were a little lacklustre, especially by the German banks, which further highlights the strong profitability of the US players

The Banker’s Top 1000 listing is the definitive ranking of the world’s major banks based on both Tier One capital and assets. It also contains the latest data on profits, performance ratios and a variety of other indicators. It is the most comprehensive global banking resource and our research team of Terry Baker-Self, Alice Partridge and Beata Ghavimi deserves enormous credit for a difficult job well done.

Besides over 110 pages of Top 1000 listings and analysis, The Banker interviews New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and the president of the African Development Bank, Omar Kabbaj, and in a special review of emerging market corporates we profile some of the major movers and shakers across the globe and note the corporates to watch.

In Capital Markets this month, our Agenda column features chairman, CEO and president of Bank of America, Ken Lewis, who shows his mettle and reveals that shrinking the bank’s costs will not hinder its bulge bracket push. Our Team of the Month is UBS with its pioneering hybrid convertible bond for Scottish Power, while Borrower of the Month is Alcatel, which has also issued a convertible bond.

In FX & Treasury, we ask the views of 12 corporate CFOs – their responses reveal that they are split on whether banks should transfer their lending risk using credit derivatives. And in Global Securities Services, it is clear that a battle of the Titans is shaping up in Chicago, not only among the indigenous players, but with European interloper Eurex as well.

In western Europe, we assess Paris’s role as a global financial centre, the future of Italy’s secretive Mediobanca and Turkey’s privatisation plans. Further east, we examine Russia’s banking sector and in Asia we analyse the latest financial developments in Taiwan, the strength of reforms in South Korea and bank privatisation in China.

Along with analysis of banking markets in Peru, Barbados, Egypt and Ethiopia, we discuss retail banking strategies in Germany and India, innovations in mobile banking, and in Tech Vision and elsewhere we examine the thorny issues around replacing legacy systems with new core systems. A mammoth issue packed with the best global financial intelligence.

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