The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Swiss National Bank announced on Thursday that their existing temporary bilateral liquidity swap arrangements are being converted to standing arrangements, that is, arrangements that will remain in place until further notice.One might think they've been doing this for a while and finally made it official. Not so, at least not between the U.S. and Switzerland. According to the SNB, they stopped making this available back in February 2010 for a time, and then started up again on May 11, 2010. The Bank of England had a similar note about May 11, 2010. We're not sure what was specially about that day, but it's now permanently special.
src: FRB Press Release
Maybe they are making lots of money on this deal, or maybe they simply need it so much they finally admit they can never stop swapping currencies. One wonders if all the QE money is sloshing around so much the big brokers keep the Central Banks scrambling to keep the currency availability high for some HFT regimen in international bonds.
The Central Bank of Japan provided and interesting set of amendments revealing (at least for Yen/Dollar swaps) the Federal Reserve will set the interest rates without qualifications (they struck the methodology for rates and now just hand it over the the New York Fed.
Here are the links for further reading.
SNB Guidelines
CBJ Amendments
BOE Guidelines
