You may be referring to me as one of the permabills (which I am). I did initially speculate something fishy with the swaps, ie that someone scooped up all the USD swap offers on bitfinex and held them briefly, the purpose being to prevent the price from rebounding after a flash crash (high 600s to low 600s, two days ago). But as I thought about it more, it seems unlikely that it would be a very effective strategy. There is simply too much volume on other markets; I think soaking up the swaps would not be strong enough to control the market, even for a short period of time.

The reason I thought of it in the first place was that I needed an explanation of why the USD swap offers would be disappearing during a flash crash, which means that people are selling BTC rather than buying it. But then I thought of what I think is a more plausible and less nefarious explanation: the flash crash triggered a great big slew of limit buy orders, and THOSE are what soaked up the USD swaps. Duhhh! Makes perfect sense, and I don't know why I didn't think of it the first time around ...