A wave of emerging market bond defaults could be about to hit, judging by where EM sovereign bonds trade against US Treasuries. But are we really looking down both barrels of a default deluge or is the situation more nuanced than the numbers suggest? Meanwhile, one very high profile emerging market borrower, Ukraine, is asking for a debt standstill. We look through what that means for the country, its investors and its future in the capital markets.We also look at whether multilateral development banks are going to swell their borrowing programmes in the coming years to help extend greater funding to the developing world and we also assess a momentous day in the eurozone as the ECB raised rates for the first time in 11 years but, critically, also launched its latest policy tool — the snappily named Transmission Protection Instrument.