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Yuki Hashimoto has left her role as a managing director in FX sales at Credit Suisse in Tokyo. Hashimoto, who is very popular with clients, has joined Morgan Stanley as a managing director based in Hong Kong, where she will head up FX Sales for Asia-Pac, including Japan.

It appears to have been a relatively calm week in FX, which, as I’m in France trying to have a holiday, suits me. The calmness seems at odds with what is happening in the wider world.

Cannons to the left of us, cannons to the right. In this case sub-prime losses being revealed across Europe, not just the USA, and monolines in slow collapse.

2007 was a mixed year for Japan, with the stock market suffering from foreign investors uncertainty following the subprime crisis and the long-hoped for recovery of the economy still not fully underway. Falling share prices in the banking sector especially interfered with several high-profile merger plans, and shareholders in bank stocks and owners of securitisations all waited nervously to see if their assets would be hit by fallout from the US subprime loans problem. Nonetheless, there were many reasons for market participants to be cheerful as overall volumes of announced M&A and DCM activity increased, and some pioneering Japanese firms consolidated domestically or sought to expand overseas. Euromoney’s inaugural Japan deals of the year highlights the year’s outstanding deals, chosen because they were well-executed, because they were especially bold or unusual in concept, and because they exemplify expected trends in capital markets in the near future.

I called a company called Global Trader Europe (GTE) on Thursday, as I’d heard a rumour that it was in a spot of bother and had closed for new business.

My old mucker David Byne has left the option pricing specialist SuperDerivatives for a new role at Credit Suisse in AES FX sales. The bank says his hire is representative of its push to roll out its highly regarded advanced execution strategies (AES), or algos as they are known, across asset classes. Byne’s departure from SuperDerivatives is amicable, although no doubt the company will miss him. He is due to start at Credit Suisse in mid-March and will report to Jonathan Wykes.

I frequently tell my children that if they can’t say anything nice, they shouldn’t say anything at all. It’s a principle I’ve been trying to adhere to all week, ever since I started getting phone calls asking me if I had seen that FXMarketSpace, the spawn of Reuters and the CME, had announced that it was no longer going to publish its volumes.

These are interesting times for the CME. I have followed the performance of the company’s shares ever since they were listed at what now looks like the unbelievable bargain price of $35 back in December 2002. The shares recently peaked at just over $700, but they have fallen back and are trading around $535. One of the factors behind the recent fall is the news that the US Department of Justice has called for the break up of the CME’s vertical silo. The exchange also owns its clearing house, which the Department of Justice feels stifles competition.

It appears that there is a shortage of e-commerce sales people, both in FX and other assets. This should be taken as a reflection of how healthy the underlying market is – good news for all those involved in it.

When news broke that Harry Culham had left Merrill Lynch, a reader asked: “How on earth are they ever going to hire any serious FX personnel after doing this again?”

My thanks to the reader who sent me a link to an article published in London’s free newspaper CityAM.

Steve Braithwaite, Steve Bellamy, Matt Strand