Credit Suisse has launched a new family of FX indices, called FX Metrics, after the launch of the FX Factor index last year.

Volumes were down across the board in June, which is not much of a surprise after May’s record breaker (Record volumes reported).

Interpreted as designed to curb capital flight; Parallel market expected to grow

Saxo Bank is launching two new CFD products in Japan following its acceptance as a member of the Japan Securities Dealers Association. The Danish bank will make the two new products – Index-tracking CFDs and Commodity CFDs – available from today.

Gain Capital, its Forex.com division and group CEO Glenn Stevens have been served with a complaint by the National Futures Association (NFA) for five counts of violation including adjusting customer leverage without notification, dictating unfair slippage parameters on MetaTrader and for using a number of unregistered introducing brokers. Gain say they will contest the charges. According to a 20 page NFA document, dated June 30 2010, seen by theWeeklyFiX, the 2009 audit of Gain found that the firm engaged in leverage and margin practices that were harmful to its customers.

Caplin Systems has launched a brand new user experience (UX) design service that is set to up the game of many single dealer platforms.

We should first give the Dodd/Frank legislation the coverage it rightly deserves...Ok, now let’s cover the other stuff.

Morgan Stanley’s Matrix platform has been a hot topic for the past year. I wrote a piece about it in February that got aggressively reposted around the web (Morgan Stanley hopes for Matrix revolution). In all honesty, I was fairly sceptical about the whole thing.

The IMF’s Currency composition of official foreign exchange reserves (Cofer) report for the first quarter of 2010 was released on Wednesday. It contained a surprise for those who believed that there had been rotation out of the troubled EUR into USD: the dollar’s share of global currency reserves in fact fell from 62.17% to 61.54%.

Oanda has launched the first iPad FX trading platform application, hot on the heels of its version for iPhone.

Barclays Capital has launched its Emerging markets local currency government bond Index family.

Remember our old pal Sudipto Chattopadhyay? Alpari’s ex-MLRO who got smacked with a £14,000 fine by the FSA for letting a number of potentially dodgy clients slip through the net?

Integral, a white-label company providing liquidity solutions for big names such as JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and UBS, has teamed up with FCStone, one of the biggest commodity risk-management advisory and execution firms in the US, to launch FCStone’s FX platform.

The 2,000-plus pages of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act have now been published and the bill has been voted through the House of Representatives, but the legislation has been subject to dilution and compromise.

Garry Popofsky, head of a large portion of BNP Paribas’ FX sales in New York, resigned last week. Popofsky’s responsibilities – heading the investor FX sales teams based in NY and Montreal, the Latin American corporate derivative and FX Sales team and the global local market sales team in NY – will be assumed by George Nunn.

Liz Walker has left Barclays Capital where she was in hedge fund sales. Market sources think Ms. Walker is strolling about 400 metres across Canary Wharf to Morgan Stanley, where she’ll probably be focussing on UK asset managers.

Robert Beange has joined RBC Capital Markets as a managing director and head of EMEA strategy. Beange was most recently at JPMorgan, where he was an FX strategist covering Central and Eastern Europe, Israel and South Africa. Before that, Beange held the positions of emerging markets economist and UK economist at Lehman Brothers.

FX and CFD retail broker FXPro announced the appointment of Jim Sutcliffe as non-executive chairman. Sutcliffe was most recently CEO of insurance and asset management company Old Mutual.

Alpari has appointed Daniel Skowronski, former MD at Currenex, to the newly created role of global chief commercial officer and US chief executive officer.

Commodities and financial derivatives broker Bache Commodities has announced the appointments of Jonathan Webb as head of FX strategy and George Tsiourvas as a vice-president, FX sales. Both will be based in London.

Ultimately, the deficit must be repaid. But changing demographics and larger savings pools suggest relatively high levels of government indebtedness might be sustainable in the short and medium term. The bigger risk is that austerity plunges a credit-constrained world into a nasty double-dip recession.

Strange I should think of this week as a quiet one when there appeared to be plenty going on. Saturday’s announcement of the renminbi revaluation, Tuesday’s UK budget, Wednesday’s FOMC...

Apocalyptic commentators have always struck me as trying to have a free option – when they’re wrong you forget it and when they’re right, we call them sages. Speaking of which, both George Soros and Warren Buffet (“We’ve just entered act two” and “We could be standing on the brink of the next financial crisis”, respectively) are banging the drum of doom. I don’t know what data they’re looking at but I can see a few things that could cause big problems if they all happen together.

One for our older UK viewers.

Digital Vega’s Medusa – “the world’s first multi-bank electronic FX options trading platform” – is within weeks of launch.

Forex.com has become one of a number of multi-dealer platforms to add equity index contracts for difference.

The CFTC and SEC will continue to investigate the flash crash of May 6 after previous reviews failed to come to any conclusions (CFTC and SEC review the flash crash).

According to an internal memo seen by the weeklyFiX, Mark McDonnell will join the London office of Bank of America Merrill Lynch in July. He is currently on gardening leave.

Citi has hired Peter Taylor as a managing director based in London. Taylor has worked for Citi before, as treasurer and head of FICC in South Africa for seven years. For the last two years he has run FICC trading at Barclays/Absa in Johannesburg.

At the annual Mansion House dinner on Wednesday George Osborne signalled the closure of the FSA and the transfer of its responsibilities to “a new prudential regulator, which will operate as a subsidiary of the Bank of England.”