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The yen was bought straight back. In the hour into London's late afternoon it rose a median 10.4 basis points against all seven of its major counterparts, and there is no Japanese release or fresh headline behind the move — none is needed, because the hour is the mirror of the one before it.

The 10.9-basis-point dip sold an hour earlier has been repurchased almost to the decimal, and that completes a pattern the day has now confirmed three times: every sell-off — 11.7 in Tokyo's morning, 11.8 in London's late morning, 10.9 into mid-afternoon — has been fully taken back within an hour or two, while the advances between them have run as large as the surge that broke dollar-yen through its 155.20-155.25 floor.

A market that repurchases every dip at this rhythm is accumulating, not chasing news. The day's story is still the run Bloomberg measured at as much as 1.4% to 154.06 per dollar — the yen's strongest since February, past the peak of the late-July intervention rally and more than six yen from the 160.39 it touched only last week — and the pair remains in the mid-154s with the broken floor overhead still untested from below.

The fuel is unchanged and, if anything, better documented. A quarter-point Bank of Japan hike on 17-18 September is fully priced, Governor Ueda has hinted the meeting will discuss higher rates, the prime minister's economic adviser has spoken of a follow-up by January, and the pension-fund story remains speculation without an announcement.

The finance ministry's latest disclosure adds the rally's most striking credential: Japan spent a record ¥15.4 trillion — roughly $99 billion — buying yen between 30 July and 26 August, the largest single-month intervention operation on record. The official actor in this market spent the summer on the rally's side of the trade, and no current reporting suggests any hand in today's hours other than the market's own.

What makes this hour's buying notable is what it rose against. Euro-area bond futures sold off through the afternoon — the 10-year Bund contract down 5.7 basis points of price on the hour and 9.8 over four hours, the 30-year Buxl down 11.7 and 13.7, all marking yields higher — as European debt prices two things at once: the inflation risk in the Gulf confrontation and Sunday's Saxony-Anhalt election, where the AfD took 43.8% of the vote and 39 of 83 seats, just short of a majority and the closest a far-right party has come to power in a German state since the war.

The euro itself is flat — the bond market is carrying the political result while the currency stands still — yet the yen rose 10.4 basis points against it anyway. A currency climbing against counterparts whose yields are rising is not riding a global duration bid; the yen's own repricing is overriding a widening rate differential, which is the signature of the positioning trade this whole day has been.

The rest of the board repeats its morning shapes. The kiwi is the session's softest currency again, lower on all seven of its legs, with the largest single move anywhere the 13.2 basis points it gave the yen — the funding-leg role of a central bank that said December, resumed the moment the big trade needed financing.

The Canadian dollar is firm on six of seven legs, weaker only against the yen, in the final hours before Canada's counter-tariffs on about C$27.6 billion of US goods take effect at a minute past midnight. The US dollar sits within half a basis point of flat, its desks dark for Labor Day a few hours more.

The Gulf file is unchanged: Iran's restricted zone beyond Hormuz — to run from the US Navy's blockade line into parts of the Gulf, with non-coordinating vessels facing sanctions — remains announced rather than declared. None of it changes the question, which now has a clock on it.

New York returns tomorrow to a broken floor it has never traded, tariffs newly in force, and its own Fed week. If dollar-yen is still below 155.20-155.25 once real liquidity has voted, the holiday break was a trend beginning; a quick reclaim would mark it an overshoot. Today's rhythm — surge, eleven-point exhale, repurchase — is the market holding its position until the electorate arrives.