ETF Securities has appointed Isabell Mössler as co-head of European sales. She will manage sales of exchange traded commodities, exchange traded currencies and exchanged traded funds across the region. Mössler previously worked for iShares, where she led the European sales division.

Lars Olesen has been appointed head of front office at the London office of Saxo Bank. He joins from Thomson & Associates and will report to Albert Maasland, senior vice-president and chief executive of Saxo Bank London.

Mass departures of staff from Barclays are turning into a regular annual event. We reported on this seasonal migration both in 2009 and 2010. However, Mike Bagguley, Barclays’ global head of FX trading, speaking to Euromoney a couple of months ago, was adamant that nothing exceptional was going on. “In 2009 and 2010 there’s been more people movement between firms generally, but our overall FX headcount has been up,” he said. This time around, however, Barclays declined to comment.

Struggles are emerging between governments nurturing weak recoveries and central banks wishing to dampen inflation. Bond markets may encourage central banks in raising rates, the BoE first, ECB later.

Kevin Connors, Goldman Sachs’ global co-head of global G10 foreign exchange sales, is understood to have left the firm abruptly last week. People with direct knowledge of the situation said that his departure was due to an internal policy breach, and not due to unsubstantiated allegations of insider trading, as some market sources had suggested.

In the first part of this roundtable on cash management, Euromoney looks at the increasing expectations from corporates of what cash management banks should offer. The second and concluding part will be published in the February issue.

Foreign exchange traders are getting used to huge volatility in their two core markets – the euro and the dollar. But they’re still battling regulators to prevent what they consider would be a damaging move to trading on exchanges.

Kevin Connors, Goldman Sachs’ global co-head of global G10 foreign exchange sales, is understood to have left the firm abruptly last week.

It didn’t look very pretty for the euro at the start of the week as EUR/USD probed down to a 1.28 handle. The week kicked off with the Swiss adding Portuguese state debt to the list of unacceptable collateral. A number of commentators pointed out the similarities between the Portuguese debt crisis and the timeline of the Irish one. A bad Portuguese auction mid-week would doubtless see the men from the European Central Bank and the IMF visiting Lisbon at the weekend. Spreads on Spain, Italy and now Belgium were widening rapidly. But the fall was arrested by Japan joining with China in declaring support for eurozone debt; or as one contact put it: “Japan has decided to diversify its crap JGB holdings by buying shite European bonds, spreading its reserves about a bit.” However, why Japan sees that as a better use of funds than reflating its own economy no one seems able to answer; with China it is less of a mystery – the authorities have to put their money somewhere and diversification away from dollars is a stated objective, Europe is a main market and support of its debt also underpins the euro, benefiting Chinese terms of trade. But one can’t help but wonder how it will all turn out with both the US and Europe in hock to China.

Just on the wires: JPMorgan is first with the publication of fourth-quarter 2010 figures. Overall net income is above forecasts at $4.8 billion, almost 50% up on 2009 Q4.

This is half rumour and half conjecture but more than once this week we have heard it mentioned as a possibility that the US might revisit the idea of a tax amnesty on US corporations’ foreign earnings alongside the mooted corporation tax reduction. Normally, unrepatriated earnings are not taxed by the US authorities but Geithner’s comment that “We don’t want the tax code creating incentives to shift investment outside the United States” might indicate that might change. It is not inconceivable that a tax amnesty, wiping the slate clean, would be a precursor to the introduction of tax on all US corporate earnings.

Institutional and retail platform Advanced Markets is set to launch its FX DMA (Direct Market Access) trading services to all clients of Hana Daetoo Securities, a leading South Korean securities broker and investment trust.

New data from FXCM confirms that December 2010 was a particularly quiet month.Retail customer trading volume totalled $233 billion, 28% lower than November 2010 ($322 billion) and 5% lower than December 2009 ($245 billion). The number of client trades was also down but less dramatically: an average of 270,656 retail client trades per day in December 2010, 22% lower than November and 1% lower than December 2009.

I don’t pretend to understand this social media stuff but I appreciate it’s a big deal if only because of my daughter’s utter inability to extricate herself from the clutches of Messenger, Twitter and Facebook, to name a few.

Bloomberg Businessweek carried an article last week positing that an exodus from carry trades – in particular those featuring USD as the funding currency – would encourage the rise in the dollar index seen since the beginning of November. But while it is likely that a mass liquidation of carry trades would lead to some dollar buying, such liquidation is still far away. Just because 2010 was a bad year for currency carry does not make it a failed strategy.

It is an interesting time to join a Spanish bank but that hasn’t stopped Andrew Brown. The former global head of FX at HSBC is back in the FX market as global head of FX at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA). The role is newly created and shows again the tendency for middle-tier banks to take FX more seriously. BBVA was 40th overall in last year’s Euromoney survey.

This morning marked opening of the Euromoney FX survey, and we need you to get voting. The polls are open for six weeks – but that is not long.

Jens Bosse, head of FX corporate solutions for Germany and Austria at Dresdner Kleinwort for nine years, has joined UBS in Zurich in a similar role. Bosse left Dresdner in late 2009 and spent 2010 at Berenberg Gossler in Hamburg before joining in the revamp of UBS’s FX salesforce.

MacNeil Curry has joined Bank of America Merrill Lynch as its chief rates and currencies technical strategist. Based in New York, Curry will be responsible for developing technical strategies and trade ideas in FX and interest rate markets with BAML’s research teams in Europe and Asia, as well as advising fixed income institutional investors.

Europe’s bottom-up problems may be on their way to solution, contrasting with the USA where Federal budgetary deficits are spreading down to States and Municipalities, with rising yields for “munis”.

Bulgaria has lower political risk than Romania. It has not had to turn to the IMF. But Greek banks’ market share in Bulgaria is 26%, twice as high as in Romania.

In global trade, the beginning of the liberalization of China’s currency was one of the most important developments of 2010. In mid-December, its impact reached Russia when HSBC announced its first cross-border renminbi trade settlement transaction there for a subsidiary of sport retail chain Sportmaster. The advent of cross-border renminbi settlement means that Russian companies no longer have to convert Russian roubles to US dollars and then to Chinese renminbi. A process that used to take three days now takes one, substantially reducing traders’ exposure to exchange rate volatility.

The two countries will not be able to sustain their export-led growth policies while inflation is boosted by QE II. Beyond that, the reduction of US deficits will further undermine Chinese and German exports, writes Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research.

The president of the EBRD tells Sudip Roy why adopting the euro is still the best option for central and eastern Europe’s EU members.

Central and eastern Europe is not a single entity when it comes to cash management. EU members in the region are committed to the union’s payment principles. By contrast, Russia and other non-EU states have much more ground to make up. Laurence Neville reports.

Success crucial for sovereign debt markets; Strong investor demand expected

Treasury secretary to make ruling in Q1; Risk mitigation duplicated, costs increased

Last month, Euromoney attended a reception celebrating a landmark anniversary for one of China’s leading financial institutions. The event was held in an historic London building and was attended by several dignitaries and luminaries of the investment world.

UniCredit has hired Dave Hitchens, a veteran options trader formerly at Toronto Dominion and Calyon, as global head of vanilla currency options. Hitchens will be based in London and report to Peter Jerrom, global head of FX derivatives.

Yasemin Cayirgan, a fluent German and Turkish speaker, who graduated from FH Aachen (an applied sciences university in Germany) in 2009, has taken the next step in her career by joining Santander in German FX sales from Nomura.