Leading central banks from around the world published their semi-annual Forex Exchange trading surveys for their respective countries. The surveys are a joint effort conducted by the US, UK, Singapore, Japan, Australia, and Canadian Foreign Exchange Committees. The surveys include data from leading FX dealers and banks and provide average daily volume data from the beginning of May through October 2012.

As the figures below show, spot FX volume data is similar to trends we saw in 2012 from US retail firms with the US and Japan being underperformers compared to the rest of the world, with overall declines occurring. The volumes also show that FX swaps continue to be a massive market, with the post global financial crisis contraction of 2010 being a thing of the past. In the US and UK where FX Swaps did slightly decline, the drop may have been the result of financial institutions having greater exposure to Europe as well as upcoming MIFID II and Dodd-Frank regulations. With Dodd-Frank laws effecting the Swaps market ready to go into effect during July 2013, many firms are still initiating plans to comply with the new requirements.

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Links to individual country surveys can be found at the conclusion of the New York FED Survey summary report.

(Correction: In a previous post of this news, figures for Japan were overstated incorrectly at $900 and $1741 billion, but were corrected below)