Today we have the release of the FOMC minutes of the April FOMC meeting and it could become really interesting to see if the FOMC signals a rate hike later this year.

Now, when the latest FOMC meeting took place in April, the FOMC participants couldn’t have at that time the latest San Francisco Fed Economic Letter at their disposal that states: “The very weak initial estimate of first-quarter real GDP growth this year surprised many forecasters, in part because it was at odds with other fairly positive data, including solid employment gains over the past six months. We show that, although the BEA (Bureau of Economic Analysis) adjusts for seasonal movements at a disaggregated level, the published real GDP data still exhibit calendar-based fluctuations-that is, residual seasonality. After we apply a second round of seasonal adjustment directly to the published aggregate data, we estimate much faster real GDP growth in the first quarter of this year. We conclude that there is a good chance that underlying economic growth so far this year was substantially stronger than reported."

That said, recently, many U.S. dollar based investors have been left as of lately with a lot of unanswered questions about “Why” the euro has risen that much since March 15 when it touched a low of $1.0465 per euro and now it quotes $1.1115 per euro that represents an unusual currency move of 6.86 percent.

Interestingly and not supporting for the euro, we just learned HSBC has informed other “banks” it will start charging them for deposits in euros, Swiss francs, Danish krone and Swedish krona, which are all currencies that have negative interest rates, at its UK, German and Hong Kong operations from August 1.

Also an important hint for further euro weakness was what ECB Executive Board member Benoit Coeure said that the ECB would “slightly” frontload its asset purchases in May and June due to low market liquidity in July and August, which for me obscures the “whole” truth and that includes the ECB intends ring-fencing itself against higher volatility it expects over the coming months.

That speech has caused the 10-year yield gap between the German Bund and the U.S. Treasury to widen from 151 basis points last Friday to 166 basis points.

This scale as well as the time span of this move is important for investors because such an important and sudden move announces higher volatility ahead, which should not be taken lightly.

When we look back till 1999 at the 30-day OHLC (open/high/low/close) volatility in the euro/dollar we saw it reaching its historical low of 3.9 percent in August 2014, after which it has trended higher and now stands at 14.75 percent while its historical average since January 1999 stands at 11.9 percent.

Now, on April 20 this volatility measure made a high of 18.2 percent, which was well above its historical average and that had only occurred two times before, which was firstly, during the dot.com bubble in 2000 and secondly, during the Great Financial Crisis in the period from end 2008/beginning 2009.

So “What’s going on?” or probably much more important “What could be coming?”

In my opinion, the euro has no other way to go than down against the dollar, and probably in a very volatile environment.

One thing is absolutely clear, this is NOT business as usual, which is in itself a serious enough problem as most investors will look for the wrong reasons in the wrong places.

To put it simple, as an investor I’d try to be prepared for a much quicker move downwards in the euro/dollar pair than generally expected over the short term.

But that’s my personal opinion and I could be wrong, the downward move in euro/dollar won’t stop at parity, albeit timed over a somewhat longer term.