It has been a very busy central bank week which started last Thursday with the ECB meeting and was followed by yesterday’s FOMC meeting, this morning’s Bank of Japan and Swiss National Bank meeting and concluded with the Bank of England meeting. This has covered all major currencies and impacted the majority of trading volume in the forex market. Over the past decade, central bank week became a rather boring affair as global central banks acted in unison in order to deliver lose monetary policy.

Let’s backtrack a bit into forex history, not to long ago, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) had their currency pegged to the Euro with an exchange rate of 1.2000 in the EURCHF as a boundary. The SNB vowed to defend this level at all costs and interfere in the forex market with its vast currency reserves in order to prevent the exchange rate from dropping below the 1.2000 level.

Today we will issues a one-two-three punch to your forex portfolio in order to rattle the cage so the pips can fall into your lap; make sure to bring a big bag of it. We will start in Asia where the Bank of Japan (BOJ) shook the markets with an announcement that it will tweak its monetary policy. The tweak was focused on how the Japanese central bank will purchase long-term debt as it already rolled back the amount it bought.

The memories of Thursday, January 15th 2015 are still rather fresh and many may have not yet recovered from the day the Swiss National Bank decided to shock financial markets which wreaked havoc on the forex market.

The Swiss National Bank shocked global financial markets today as it abandoned is minimum exchange rate against the Euro which it introduced in September of 2011. This limit put a floor under the EURCHF at 1.2000 and the SNB has defended this level ever since then. This move was completely unexpected and no economists had forecasted the SNB to take this drastic measure.