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Anne Leclercq, head of the Belgian Debt Agency front office, and Baudouin Richard, chairman of the executive committee and chairman of the board, MTS Associated Markets

Should Europe adopt US bankruptcy laws? This is one of the debates that is being increasingly aired by banks and corporates across Europe. A growing view is that companies have a better chance of getting themselves out of the mire if they are based in the US than in Europe. However, others argue that it is not so much the adoption of US bankruptcy laws that needs to take place in Europe: it is the attitude towards bankruptcy that needs to change. It is a fact almost universally acknowledged that corporates that have fallen on hard times have a much better chance of successful rehabilitation if they are based in the US than in Europe. "I think the US does have a more adaptable approach to restructuring than Europe," says David Kirshenbaum, managing director, European investment bank at Citigroup/SSSB in London. "The US process is simpler to navigate through and gives all constituencies more time to restructure companies and to maintain them as going concerns often with the same management in place."

Zeti Akhtar Aziz, governor of Bank Negara Malaysia

Fallen and flaming angels, distressed debt, falling knives - sadly, these are the new buzzwords of the high yield market, and they are not the kind of phrases that the European market pioneers had in mind when the asset class was born five years ago. They might be more comfortable with the jargon of CDOs, disclosure and rising stars. But can these more positive trends counter the negativity and persuade investors to get back into the game? The structure and character of the European high yield market today is not quite what its champions had in mind when it sprang to life at the end of the 1990s. Then, the expectation was that the launch of the market signalled the arrival of a new asset class characterised by exciting growth stories and LBOs offering chunky long term returns. Nobody, of course, was naive enough to imagine that this would be a default-free market...

Giampiero Atonelli, head of finance

Krassimir Katev, first deputy minister of finance and head of asset/liability management

Maria Cannata, head of public debt direction

Satu Huber, director of finance

Sergio Edeza, treasurer, bureau of the treasury, department of finance

Brian Molefe, deputy director general, asset and liability management at the South African treasury

The US has one great advantage over Europe when it comes to restructuring - one common law, Chapter 11. The European legal system, meanwhile, remains fragmented and there has been no real progress to unite it. However, more restructuring opportunities will start to emerge in the EU as a by-product of the economic environment and changes in the way in which business is financed, meaning that there will be plenty of work for the restructuring practitioners and insolvency lawyers.

Misery, as Trinculo told us in Shakespeare's Tempest, acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. And in recent months they have not come much more miserable than Marconi, or its investors and bankers. The Cinderella version of the Marconi story, or saga, would have it that restructuring leaves the way clear for the company to rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of devastation created by its previous management, and for everybody to live happily ever after.