FX-MM magazine blog

An alternative look at the trading, treasury and technology world…

Inflation Island – the next Call of Duty?

15 March 2011
Does the ECB really think we don’t understand that monetary policy is not something you can just 'sort out' in your lunch break?

Technology: the death of etiquette

2 March 2011
Eleanor Hill, Editor, FX-MM, looks at the do's and don'ts of using mobile devices...well, more the don'ts really...

Let’s see the colour of your currency

16 February 2011
Guest blogger Kevin Neville, Rule Financial, waxes lyrical on why FX swaps should not be exempt from central clearing…

Will Egypt put a curse on the international recovery?

3 February 2011
As we watch the events in Cairo unfold, Eleanor Hill assesses the economic and financial impact of the uprisings locally and globally...

Social media to show its worth with corporate business intelligence

20 January 2011
Guest columnist Denise Bedell discusses how social media provides a powerful tool in the arsenal of any company, and how it is becoming ever-more important as new solutions bring together social media outlets with business intelligence (BI) solutions...

What’s your New Year’s resolution?

5 January 2011
Some of the most respected figures in the industry have given us their New Year's resolutions, providing an insight into some of the major challenges that lie ahead in 2011, and we invite you to add your own thoughts...

Basel III – a man walks into a bar…

3 December 2010
Imagine my joy when I stumbled across a Basel III one liner during a recent Google search...

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day…

17 November 2010
New website, new avenues. While social media has potential in the product development sphere, encouraging more interactivity with end-users for instance, how an earth can I tally my tweet frequency with actual revenue?

Going Dutch? Cash only please!

10 November 2010
An orange juice, medium latte and a blueberry muffin – the perfect start to a long day at Sibos. Unless you’re in Amsterdam and not carrying any cash that is...

That is the question!

11 October 2010
There is nothing like a great question to kick off a lively debate and one thing that the Sibos programme illustrates is the importance of a carefully worded leading question, which can be more important, perhaps, or more interesting, sometimes, than the actual answer.

I didn’t get where I am today…

20 September 2010
The evocative portrayal of corporate Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, laid bare in the 1980's TV sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, has somehow pushed itself to the forefront of my mind as I pen this, my very last jottings from the Editor's chair...

Time to go long… fast!

12 August 2010
With that peculiarly infuriating demeanour of a primary school teacher patiently imparting a mild rebuke to a seven year-old tearaway, the motorway police officer uttered those immortal words that I thought were solely the stuff of seventies sit-coms: “Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?”

Under stressure

14 July 2010
For a few days at the end of June, a small, sorry, dysfunctional group of people became even more reviled in their country than bankers. Selflessly offering respite from banker-bashing, England's ludicrously overpaid yet under-performing national football team drew their fellow countrymen's fire...

Into the unknown…

12 May 2010
As European windscreens are finally washed clean of ash deposited from the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajokull - a name which hangs heavy on our lips, (or it would do if only we could pronounce it) - which, as it sputters to a gaseous burp, gives way to the potentially greater fallout from the big fat Greek debt cloud as it sets about dumping a lot of something considerably more solid and messy on the heads of us all, we're left with a decidedly uneasy feeling of ‘what next?' At least by the time you read this, it will have been decided in the United Kingdom just who the lucky lot will be who get to run the country. Of course, it may be a hung parliament - or at any rate, a party coming through with no overall majority. With so much uncertainty around, getting to know the unknowns looks like being a state of mind which we may all have to come to terms with.

It’s complicated

29 April 2010
"It's complicated." Ah yes, how often we hear that particular mantra these days - and nowhere more so than when applied to financial markets. The latest conundrum to get me scratching my head in bewilderment was bound up in the recent hold the front page headlines proclaiming: big bank says it's going to make a profit!