The dollar just took a real hit against the yen, and the reason is unusual enough to sit with for a second: this wasn’t Tokyo intervening alone, the way it usually does when the yen gets too cheap for its own inflation to bear. This time Washington joined in — Bessent apparently had a shopping list, $5-10 billion of yen, and today it looks like they spent it. Coordinated currency intervention is rare. The last one anyone really talks about was over a decade ago.

Here’s what makes me sit up. A huge amount of this year’s AI capex boom — the $250 billion Nvidia financing for an Ohio data center, Meta’s five-gigawatt Louisiana build, all of it — has happened while yen borrowing stayed dirt cheap. Cheap yen is how a lot of leveraged risk-taking gets funded quietly: borrow in a currency with near-zero rates, buy assets somewhere hotter. It’s the same mechanism behind a very bad day for markets back in August 2024. If the yen actually strengthens instead of just getting talked up, that trade gets less comfortable, and Leopold Aschenbrenner is not the only person finding out this month what an unwind feels like.

Meanwhile Trump called off the planned Iran strikes over “the perimeters of a deal,” oil slid, and Dow futures jumped 600 points — the fourth or fifth time this month the market has cheered a ceasefire that didn’t quite hold. At some point cheering it stops meaning belief and starts meaning fatigue.

And somewhere in my feed, for what feels like the thirtieth straight day, a fund bought a few more shares of something called Macro Bank. Not because anyone’s bullish on Argentina. Because the ticker matches the search term.

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