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Several billion pounds have been raised on the Alternative Investment Market ( AIM) over the last four years, following the billion-plus invested on its predecessor, the Unlisted Securities Market, over a much longer period. Another half billion has flowed into venture capital trusts (VCTs) which offer 20% income tax relief and other incentives to invest in very small companies.

The European Commission estimates 7-16 percent of the European economy is informal, giving a range of approximately EUR500 billion-1.1 trillion ($448.8 billion to $987 billion) that is effectively a cash economy. The smallest informal economies are estimated to be in Scandinavia, Ireland, Austria and the Netherlands, each at around a very honest, and modest, 5 percent of GDP. But that balloons to over 20 percent in Italy and Greece.

Turnover on the local currency A-share markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen, which are restricted to Chinese investors, has more than trebled, to a daily $6 billion - 8 billion, and prices have soared... The hard-currency B-share markets, supposedly reserved for foreigners but in fact havens for hot Chinese money, have almost doubled from their all-time lows earlier this year.

In a classic Pac Man defense, Elf responded to TOTAL FINA's unsolicited offer with a $55 billion counter offer. Jones Day worked with TOTAL FINA to prevent Elf from holding a special shareholders meeting to increase the company's capital to pay for its TOTAL FINA offer - a critical step in defeating the Pac Man offer. Negotiations between the two companies ended when Elf finally accepted an increased offer of $58 billion from TOTAL FINA.

Despite the strictest anti-money-laundering laws in the world, U.S. banks are still the involuntary custodians of up to $500 billion a year in dirty money. Even the $5 billion that drug cartels launder through the receivables departments of U.S. corporations... passes through a U.S. bank at some point. The United States, says the Brookings Institution's Raymond Baker, is "the largest repository of ill-gotten gains in the world."

Further, there is now more variety for investors. The previous record for weekly issuance last June was owed entirely to a sole jumbo bond offering from Deutsche Telekom AG. By contrast, the recent $15 billion week is the product of a number of issuers, including DaimlerChrysler AG's $7.1 billion deal, as well as deals from Heller Financial Inc., General Motors Corp., and self-issues from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

Syed Wasimuddin, spokesman for the State Bank of Pakistan, told Dow Jones Newswires that the main difference from last year was the increased purchases from the interbank market compared with the money changers' kerb market. The central bank... purchased $1.068 billion from the money changers' kerb market in the period, compared with $1.561 billion a year earlier, the spokesman said.

Ted Turner, for example, used his billion-dollar pledge to the United Nations as public proof that he is on the side of the angels of social justice. Bill Gates has set up a $22 billion foundation, in part to rescue his reputation from the charge that he is a modern-day robber baron. CEOs I have talked to often explain their philanthropic involvement by saying, "I am just trying to give back to the community."

A deterioration in loans to mainland-related companies has forced the Bank of China's local operations to drastically increase bad debt provisions in the six months to June 30, causing a 46.74 per cent plunge in pretax profit to $3 billion.

Management got the job done, hacking the UK payroll from 17,000 in 1990 to 2,200 today, shutting plants and shovelling cash out of the door. In just nine years, the dividends, special dividends and share buybacks have returned to investors the entire £3.6 billion paid to the government for the assets. And the shareholders still own a company trading at three times the £1.75 price paid at flotation.