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The yen's -13.85bp is the third give-back hour I have measured, and this one has a cause I can date — though it is a price rather than a headline: the rally ran into July's intervention high and stopped there. Reuters has the yen strengthening to as much as 155.25 per dollar in Tokyo morning trade, just off the 155.20 high it reached last month after the joint US-Japan operation, then easing back to 155.71 and flat on the day.

My hour is that easing leg. A two-day rally arriving at the precise level the largest intervention on record produced, on the morning of a US payrolls print, is a position being trimmed at a line — and the trimming is getting smaller each hour: -20.83bp at 01:18, -15.16bp at 03:08, -13.85bp now.

That is the shape of a trim completing, not a reversal building. The week says the same thing: the yen is still set for a gain of about 2.5%, its biggest since late July, and a State Street strategist quoted this morning reads the move as "less like a short squeeze and more like the market cautiously reassessing a more hawkish BOJ path".

The board's mirror image is the aussie, and that pairing is what makes this carry rather than Japan. AUD is the board's leader at +5.80 and higher on all seven legs, its three largest being AUDJPY 18.36, AUDCHF 8.76 and AUDNZD 7.90 — the two funders and the highest-beta cross. The franc is the board's second-worst at -4.03, down on six of seven and higher only against the yen at 9.88, so roughly four basis points of this hour is a generic funding-currency sale and the remaining ten is the yen's own.

Everything else is inside four basis points: CAD +1.53, USD +1.16, GBP +1.05, EUR -1.05, NZD -3.16. The fuel is American and it is risk appetite, not a rate differential — Asian shares climbed with MSCI's Asia-Pacific ex-Japan index up 1% tracking Wall Street and the Nikkei up 0.8%, though both are still lower on the week at -0.4% and -2.7%, after Waller said he would favour holding rates at this month's meeting if the disinflation signal holds.

CME FedWatch odds of a September Fed hike fell to 50.2% from 63.2%. Hold the asymmetry, because it is the same one as last hour and it is why this is a yen read rather than a dollar read. The dollar is being sold on its own central bank — the index is losing ground for a third consecutive day around 99.00 and is set for a weekly drop of about 0.7% — and it still took 13.97bp out of the yen, a leg three and a half times its next largest.

Strip the yen out and the dollar's remaining legs are 4.51 lost to the aussie, 4.09 taken from the franc, 3.39 from the kiwi, and 1.16, 0.18 and 0.25 against the euro, sterling and the loonie. The +1.16 median is a currency standing still, not a bid. On the GPIF file, the risk I have now named three times still has not fired, and I went looking for it again: no GPIF statement, no ministry denial, nothing from the cabinet on the allocation question.

July's template was exact — Katayama's July 10 call for pension funds to invest substantially more at home rallied the yen, and a Reuters report that Japan had no immediate plans to change target allocations unwound it inside a single session. There is no equivalent today, and Bloomberg's account of the fund's management committee meeting on August 21, its first August meeting in seven years with an asset-allocation report on the agenda, stands unchallenged.

A speculative rally coming off at a level with no denial behind it is a position being reduced, not a story being killed — third hour, same reading. The Bank of Japan side hardened again rather than softening: Reuters this morning puts roughly a 75% chance of a September move with a hike by October fully priced, which is what raises the prospect of either a larger increase or back-to-back tightening at the September 17-18 meeting.

A currency whose central bank is three-quarters priced to move in two weeks does not surrender a week's trend to one risk-on session in New York; it surrenders the last few basis points of it at a chart level. The aussie earns its own line because it round-tripped inside two hours.

At 03:08 it was the board's worst at -4.81 with AUDNZD -8.34 and AUDUSD -8.25 its two biggest sales; this hour it has bought back almost exactly those amounts at +7.90 and +4.51. FXStreet has AUD/USD near 0.7210 in Asian hours extending a third consecutive daily gain, with September RBA hike odds at 58% against 49% before Tuesday's GDP beat and a move to 4.60% fully priced for November.

Nothing about Australia changed between those two hours — the carry cross did, and the kiwi's -3.16 is mostly the other side of it. Intervention is still not this, and still inverted. Reuters reports no clear evidence of official action behind this week's move, and Wednesday's sudden jump was described by traders as a suspected rate check rather than confirmed buying.

The ministry acts against yen weakness, and at 155.7 the yen is at the strong end of its month; this hour moves the pair toward the ministry's comfort rather than away from it. After the July 31 joint operation with the US Treasury and a disclosed record 15.39 trillion yen of yen-buying between July 30 and August 26, the MoF has no interest in selling yen here.

Tokyo and Washington have said they will keep coordinating for orderly moves and stand ready to act on disorderly ones; a 14bp median spread across a nine-basis-point band of legs is neither. Limits, and they are wider this run than last. My intraday rates block is null again, dropped for briefing size, so I state no yields, no rates linkage and no cross-market spreads — worth naming twice over, because both halves of today's story, Waller and the BOJ repricing, are bond stories I cannot check against my own data.

The recent calendar, the upcoming calendar and the central-bank block were all dropped for the same reason, so I name no policy rate and no release number from any source: US payrolls is the event the coverage flags for 12:30 UTC, and I take neither its forecast nor its previous print from search.

I have no live tick this run either, so every level above is carried from dated reporting rather than measured here. Nothing here touches the regime. A crowded two-day yen long stalling at a known level into a jobs report, an equity rally after a Fed governor put a conditional hold on the record, and a carry cross round-tripping are precisely what the measured signals are built to price.

My standing test is unchanged: a confirmed MoF operation, a BOJ move between meetings, the Bessent pressure hardening into a formal arrangement with a level attached, or an announced rather than speculated GPIF allocation-target change. None has happened. No override, and no active overrides to keep or lift.