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Kyrgyzstan’s provisional government is determined to go ahead with a referendum on moving towards parliamentary democracy next month, despite attempts by supporters of deposed president Kurmanbek Bakiyev to disrupt it, a top Kyrgyz diplomat has said

The Kazakh banking sector is emerging from its crisis and institutions’ financial indicators are set to improve, Kazakhstan’s central bank governor Grigory Marchenko said in an interview this weekend

Singapore may lose some hedge fund managers because of a proposed tightening of regulation announced last week – but will be stronger as a consequence, a minister has told Emerging Markets

A $750 million credit guarantee fund, aimed at galvanising Asia’s embryonic local-currency corporate bond market, will be launched on Sunday when finance ministers from the ASEAN+3 group gather in Tashkent for their annual meeting

The Asian market rally roared on last week as strong corporate earnings and cheap liquidity offset the impact of the Greek debt crisis

Economic cooperation and integration in Asia will not be damaged or reversed by the crisis unfolding in the eurozone, analysts argue, as the outlook dims

Asia emerged from the global economic crisis faster and more robustly than many expected. But the challenge for policy-makers remains how to rebalance the region’s growth model

The region’s bull market has come at a price: large-scale capital inflows have piled upward pressure on currencies while raising the risk of asset bubbles

Asia must hike interest rates and cut government spending in order to combat inflation and stem the risk of economic overheating, experts urged yesterday, as fears grow that loose policies in the region could lead to a hard landing

I was pleasantly surprised last week to see Standard Chartered flying the flag for synthetic securitisation, and only days after the SEC came out fists flying trying to take down Goldman Sachs for a synthetic CDO from back in 2007.

Just as people in the financial markets thought they were starting to put the crisis behind them, a slew of regulatory reports has brought the early days of the crunch back into focus. They make clear that solvency, not liquidity, was the key issue all along.

It’s still too early to say that the securitisation market has normalised, but the reception of Obvion’s RMBS last week shows that securitisation is once again a viable funding source. On current trends it might soon, for some issuers at least, provide competitive pricing compared to covered bonds.