In other words, the cost of swapping Australian dollars into US dollars became quite expensive. In recent years, this significant increase in the cost of obtaining US dollars in short-term swaps had been commonplace for some other currencies (e.g. euro and yen) at year-end, but not for the Australian dollar (Graph 3).
However, this year the effect of elevated year-end demand for US dollars in swap markets on the Australian dollar basis has been much larger than normal. This is consistent with the smaller supply of US dollars from the Australian banks than in the past.