FX Poll 1999: Life after execution

Walk around the foreign-exchange trading floors this year and the first thing you notice is how quiet they all are. Gone are the squawk boxes and the telephones ringing non-stop. Instead the desks are top-heavy with machinery, and as much of the day seems to be spent watching the Kosovo crisis unfold on CNN as dealing. But Richard Moore, European foreign-exchange manager at Citibank denies that the markets are less exciting than usual. "Although customer and interbank deal volumes are lower so far this year, the need for high-quality market advice and interpretation remains a key requirement for our client base," he says. "After all, the euro has dropped more than 10%, the yen has traded in an 11% range ­ and it's still only April."

Hal Herron, global head of foreign exchange at Deutsche Bank, London, says: "Sure, the market is currently less noisy, but less noise can be good because you get to spend more time with clients working out solutions to their problems."