Are safe haven Swiss Franc, yen and dollar looking not so safe?

Ask an investor to name safe-haven currencies, and most will say the U.S. dollar, the Swiss franc, and the Japanese yen.

Investors historically expected them to hold their value during geopolitical or economic turbulence.

But more recently, these currencies have experienced volatility themselves. The dollar and yen saw sharp declines over 2025 and into 2026. The franc has strengthened, but this is challenging for a country with unusually low inflation and a reliance on exports.

U.S. President Donald Trump reordered global trade with tariffs in 2025, sparking a “sell America” trade: a sell-off of U.S. assets, including the dollar, the world’s reserve currency.

The suddenness with which other tariffs have been imposed and withdrawn kept the pressure up.

In a December note, Swiss private bank Julius Baer stated that “erratic trade policies” were just one cause of the dollar’s woes, adding that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” put the U.S. on “an unsustainable debt trajectory.”

Trump’s pressure on U.S. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell also undermined investors’ confidence in the dollar, the note said.

The dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of peers, tumbled 1.3% on Jan. 29 after Trump said the dollar is “doing great,” its sharpest drop in a day since Trump first announced tariffs in April. It took the greenback to its lowest level in almost four years.

The index plunged 9.37% in 2025, and it has fallen further in 2026.

In a Wednesday note, George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, said the dollar’s safe-haven status was “myth.”

He challenged the notion that the dollar “rallies during risk-aversion,” adding: “A simple chart of the dollar-equity relationship shows this not to be true. The average USD-equity correlation has historically been closer to zero, and over the last year the dollar has once again de-correlated from the S&P.”

Cole Smead, CEO and portfolio manager at Smead Capital Management, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” at the end of January that he sees further weakness ahead for the dollar.

“We’re in a dollar bear market longer term,” he said. “If you go back and look at these ‘American manias’ [in markets], if you go back and look at the telecom bubble and tech bubble the late 1990s, the dollar peaked in 2002 and within six years, you saw the dollar go to a low it hadn’t seen for [a] very, very long time.”

The U.S. dollar index nosedived by around 41% between 2002 and its 2008 low.