FX Markets Trading on Fear, Need to 'Calm Down': Analyst

The foreign exchange market is running scared and there will be a fresh round of quantitative easing, David Bloom, global head of foreign exchange markets at HSBC told CNBC Wednesday.

“It’s a race between more money for Greece and QE3 it seems at the moment as far as the market’s concerned,” he said.

“They may not call it QE3, they’ll come up with some fancy-schmancy name. We’ve heard of troika, we’ve heard of reprofiling, I’m sure we’re going to get some other new words,” Bloom added.

He added that despite concerns over the euro zone, the euro dollar rate was more detrimental to the US currency.

“I mean don’t forget that last time this kind of situation happened in 2000, where people were talking about Italy breaking up and the Northern League of Umberto Bossi, the euro traded at less than 0.80… this time, the euro’s trading at $1.44.

"This isn’t a European crisis, this is a dollar crisis. The problem that we face is that a euro crisis would create a systemic problem throughout the world, so it’s just as bad for everyone else."

"The thing that is benefiting throughout all of this is gold and now the Swiss Franc is going absolutely nuts because nobody thinks they’ve got an option,” he added.

Bloom explained that market fears were due to a combination of events, including sluggish growth prospects for the US economy, persistent fears over solutions to the debt crisis in Greeceand fresh concerns over China.

“I think investors are getting very worried, it’s fear which is dominating the markets at the moment,” Bloom said.

Pointing to Chinese growth, he said the Chinese economy would simply reach more sustainable growth levels rather than experience a slowdown.

“I think the market’s exaggerating something that is going to slow to a much more sustainable growth rate – you can’t grow at 13 or 14 percent – so if you slow down to 9 or something like that, it feels like a big slowdown,” he added.

“It’s just symptomatic of a market that wants to worry about risk, of course. For some of the equity valuations they don’t seem to worry about that too much, but next thing you know you’re worrying about using your mobile phone, drinking coffee, I mean what kind of world are we living in? Calm down everybody.”