The bet against the dollar is showing early signs of turning, setting up yet another curveball in global markets for 2025.
This year, the swoon in the US currency has been one of the more notable reactions to the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump’s global trade tariffs. Instead of springing higher, as the dollar usually does in times of stress, it dropped hard, extending declines that started earlier in his second term. This made the first half of 2025 the worst start to any year for the currency in more than half a century — a massive thumbs down from global markets to the president’s adventures in geopolitics and global trade.
That thumbs down sparked a historic torrent of currency trading. The Bank for International Settlements’ triennial survey of the foreign exchange market just happened to perform its analysis in April, during the wildest part of the storm. Last month, the BIS revealed that an average of nearly $10tn changed hands in the currency markets every day over that period — up by nearly a third compared with the same month three years ago.