Switzerland

In a large private garden in Manhattan, behind a grand New York City brownstone, a man in his 90s took the hand of a young girl who is not yet 12. The bridge between them, the man's son, the girl's father, stood at a distance, looking on.

"That was pure love," says Sandi Pei, the 60-year-old son of I.M. Pei, the architect who designed Hong Kong's Bank of China tower and the Pyramid at the Louvre, in Paris, France. "I wasn't quite sure whether Anna was leading my father or if he was leading her."

April 20 (Bloomberg) -- UBS AG, Switzerland’s largest bank, agreed to sell its Brazilian unit UBS Pactual to Andre Esteves, the former head of the unit, for $2.5 billion to reduce risk and strengthen its balance sheet.

The sale of the business, which UBS agreed to buy for $2.6 billion in 2006, will lead to a “small loss,” the Swiss bank said today from Zurich. The price represents a premium to book value and will be paid in cash and partly through the assumption of liabilities by Esteves’s BTG Investments, UBS said.

ABN Amro has launched a new range of stock market indices, designed to outperform traditional benchmarks with the aid of market timing. The new indices, which will be independently calculated by Standard & Poor's, will be called the ABN Amro Alpha range.

The indices are based on the observation that investors tend to reduce risk in the approach to the end of the month or to public holidays such as Christmas. ABN Amro believes this is because traders usually have to report profits and losses at the end of these periods. They accordingly wish to "lock in" their gains.