At the end of last week, Saxo Bank was served with a number of injunctions by Finanstilsynet (the Danish FSA) following a series of investigations that were launched during 2009 and 2010, to examine the bank’s commitment to investor protection and its anti-money laundering protocols.

CLS announced today that Nomura has become the 61st shareholder and settlement member of CLS Group after being a third-party member for many years.

It wasn’t a good week for UK debt figures. On Monday the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) published a study purporting to show the real state of public finances. It estimated the UK’s true public debt at £2 trillion compared with official figures of around £900 billion. This wasn’t a total surprise; the right-wing think tank Centre for Policy Studies estimated £2.2 trillion back in November last year.

Bruce Krasting at Seeking Alpha broke the news to the non-German speaking world that Swiss newspaper Neu Zuricher Zeitung, often said to be the mouth-piece of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), has been highly critical of the central bank’s intervention policy.

A couple of weeks ago Nick Beecroft told me that he reckoned we might be moving into a period where US economic weakness trumped Eurozone debt concerns. I didn’t pay the idea much attention. EUR/USD had bounced from the lows, failed to break 1.2500, and retraced back to a 1.22 handle. It looked to me that we’d had a shakeout and the move towards parity could resume. But Beecroft was absolutely right; I was daft not to pay a little more attention to the opinion of a man who’d run the FX operations at Deutsche, Citi and Standard Chartered.

Back in February Ricardo Zulliger left Commerzbank New York, where he was head of fixed income and currencies sales in the Americas. He updated his LinkedIn account with the immortal line: “I will be back...”

StreamBase, the complex event processing software company, has announced a partnership with MarketFactory, a technology company providing algorithmic FX trading applications. The partnership will help hedge funds, banks and proprietary trading firms speed their ‘time to first trade’ in the spot foreign exchange market.

Includes Bonds, Equities, Loans, M&A, MTN, Project Finance

There were those who thought that, once Dodd/Frank had passed, the world would know how financial markets would be regulated by the US authorities. But they were wrong.

Societe Generale has strengthened its emerging markets and FX strategy teams in London by hiring Benoit Anne and Kit Juickes.

Deutsche Bank has announced that Alan Ruskin will join the firm’s global research group as a managing director and global head of G10 FX strategy. Ruskin will report to Bilal Hafeez, managing director and global head of FX research, and be based in New York. Ruskin will join the bank in August following a notice period.

As of Thursday this week (8 July), option contracts on EUR/USD futures began on FORTS, the derivatives market of the Russian Trading System (RTS) stock exchange.

RBS announced on Monday that its chief markets strategist, Bob ‘The bear’ Janjuah, has left the bank. Janjuah is one of the more colourful commentators around and fully earned the title of ‘the world’s most bearish man’ conferred on him by FT Alphaville.

Three months ago we reported of Lyndsay Glynn’s departure from Bank of America Merrill Lynch (FX people moves: Bank of America Merrill loses institutional sales head).

Forex Capital Markets (FXCM) opened its Australia office in early 2009 to act as headquarters for the company's expansion into the south-Pacific region. Now it seems that the operation is fully bedded down – FXCM Australia has announced it is launching CFDs in the Australian market.

WDX Organisation, creators of the world currency unit or funkily monikered Wocu, has announced the signing of a non-exclusive agreement with the Warsaw-based Polish Futures Market (PRT), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Warsaw Commodities Exchange (WGT).

The investment bank of the year has performed strongly where you’d expect it to – in flow, debt and derivatives – and surprised many with its advances in M&A and corporate finance.

China opens door to currency flexibility; ‘No need for major revaluation’

The global financial crisis hit Africa hard, with the sub-Saharan region growing by just 2% in 2009. But the continent is bouncing back – the IMF expects growth in sub-Saharan Africa to be close to 5% in 2010 and 6% in 2011.

It has been a bumpy 12 months for the Middle East’s banks and capital markets. The announcement of Dubai’s debt standstill in November 2009 and the defaults of the Saad and Al Gosaibi groups in Saudi Arabia early in 2010 hurt some international banks so badly it made them question their commitment to the region.

The acquisition of Lehman Brothers gave Barclays Capital the momentum to become a clear global leader in the part of the business most investment banks are desperate to grow.

The escalating European sovereign debt crisis has caused some analysts to question the financial health of even some of the strongest, best-run banks in the region. This is primarily because of the banks’ exposure to the bonds of EU governments and the possibility of restructuring or defaults among southern European eurozone members.

Citi has been Euromoney’s best regional bank in Asia for more than a decade. It has built a business that delivers consistent results regardless of the fortunes of the global franchise. It has not faced a serious challenge for the title throughout much of that time as Asia-based banks have not yet reached scale in their own regions, and global competitors have failed to match the US bank’s reach and penetration across Asia. Now that has changed.

Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank win top honours in Euromoney Awards for Excellence; Vikram Pandit of Citigroup wins inaugural Banker of the Year award

The past year has been extremely volatile in central and eastern European markets, with sentiment ebbing and flowing dramatically, testing the mettle of all the banks in the regions. The past few months have begun to provide some welcome clarity, however, with the economic downturn in the region generally proving to have been sharp but short-lived. As a result most market players are now seeking to reap the long-term rewards of central and eastern Europe’s economic potential as a low-cost, high-quality base for manufacturers and service providers looking to serve western European and Asian markets.

Latin America’s economic performance over the past 12 months can be summed up in one word – resilient. While many of the world’s advanced economies are stuck in a trough, emerging regions such as Asia and Latin America have rebounded much faster from the global downturn thanks to sound monetary and fiscal policies and generally healthy banking systems.

Less than two months after its acquisition of FX platform ODL Markets (FXCN acquisition goes ahead), Forex Capital Markets (FXCM) has announced that ODL has adopted its ‘no dealing desk’ (NDD) execution model.

There has always been some paranoia in retail FX about the possibility of being ripped off by the platforms. Many of these complaints were risible, insisting that price could be deliberately spiked by the platform to take an unfortunate trader out of his tiny position. However, the publication of the complaint against Gain/Forex.com has given further impetus to the paranoia (National Futures Association serves complaint to Gain Capital).

Galle Global Macro Partners, a global hedge fund that started up earlier this year, are the latest firm to connect to Traiana’s Harmony network.