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China’s decision makers should avoid expanding the state’s control because it would create “crony capitalism,” professor Wu Jinglian said

Local Russian banks now see VTB and Sberbank as international players, somewhat removed from their world. At the same time, international banks still do not consider them a real threat. The truth is that both sets of rivals should be worried.

Chinese insurance group PICC raised HK$21.01bn ($3.09bn) in Hong Kong’s biggest IPO of the year last week. The sheer size of the deal means ECM bankers can end the year with some pride, but this is not a feat that can be often repeated. True bookbuilds, not club deals, will be needed to resuscitate the market in 2013.

Throughout this year the credit curve has flattened, forcing investors to chase anything offering a decent spread. But this mood cannot possibly last through the whole of next year. That's why challenged issuers should waste no time in accessing the market while they still can.

The country’s nascent hybrid market has been hit a major blow by financial authorities whose indecisiveness is squeezing an avenue of funding that could boost business for struggling industrials.

Asiamoney's 23rd annual Brokers Poll - the largest to date with over 5,900 individual responses from 2,295 different institutions - invited chief investment officers, senior fund managers and senior investment analysts at fund management houses, hedge fund & private equity firms, insurance companies and wealth management houses in Asia to vote on who they thought were the region's leading brokerages for research and sales. Here are the results.

Asian equity investors were largely consistent with their opinions on the best domestic brokerages in the region. Most of last year’s winners continued to reign supreme in 2012 as well.

Both official and final HSBC PMI for November showed that the world’s second-largest economy has bottomed out, economists say

In this round up of recent regulatory news, Australia paves the way for retail investing in bonds, China introduces new rules for rating bonds, Hong Kong revises sukuk rules, more flexibility for bond investors in India and the Philippines tackles the distortion in short-term rates.

—Simon Yates, global head of equity derivatives at Citigroup in New York, on his biggest concerns in relation to derivatives regulation.

Deutsche Bank launched MSCI Pakistan IM and MSCI Bangladesh IMÑthe world’s first synthetic exchange-traded funds using indices based on those countries equity markets.

Brazil's gross domestic product increased by just 0.6% in the third quarter from the second, despite the stimulus and sharp interest rate cuts