Well now is the time to savour it again - FX will be showing all five series, from the beginning, starting tonight.
That is not surprising, given how efficient FX markets are.
"The FX market has been exceptionally quiet," moaned currency analysts at Citigroup recently.
It has done a remarkable job of mitigating risk in the foreign-exchange (FX) market.
Although they have yet to detail their case against banks, their investigations are focusing on whether FX traders bilked clients by fiddling widely-used daily benchmarks.
Look out for a strong turnaround in regional FX and equities on Monday morning, assuming there are no further political broadsides.- Although Hungary's self-imposed higher beta status implies stronger relative immediate-term upside potential, we prefer to stick to our O/W equity/FX recommendations in those countries where the policy-debt visibility mix is stronger, namely Turkey and Russia.
Economic growth will thus be more sluggish if the wars continue.It is a hard case to prove, since the greatest FX volatility in the last 20 years occurred during the Asian/Russian crisis of the late 1990s and the debt crisis of 2008.
Within the developed world, however, FX markets have been remarkably stable, part of a general decline in volatility.
It operates a "payment-versus-payment" mechanism in which instructions from counterparties to an FX trade are authenticated, matched and settled on an agreed date.
That is on top of losses the bankers made at their own FX trading desks in the immediate aftermath of the SNB's move, reportedly $400m for Deutsche Bank, Citigroup and Barclays combined.
The upshot is that floating exchange rates have seldom been so stable: volatility has plunged to its lowest level in two decades (see chart 2).As a result, once-keen users of banks' FX services have learned to do without them.
