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The question every hour of the London morning deferred — what the biggest book in the market would pay for a yen at seven-month highs — got its first answer, and the answer was: more. Into the New York morning, the first full American session since Monday's holiday, the yen rose a median 18.6 basis points against all seven of its major counterparts, its largest hour of buying since the overnight run that printed 152.87, with no Japanese release anywhere near the window.

Every leg went the yen's way — 24.4 basis points from the euro, 23.0 from the Canadian dollar — and the largest cell on the board was the dollar's leg at 32.2, because the hour's other half is the second question: the dollar fell against all seven of its counterparts, the mirror image of mid-morning, when it was briefly up on everything.

The London tape had spent five of six hours walking the yen lower in easing size, the orderly look of a book squaring up ahead of the deepest liquidity of the week; the deep liquidity arrived and took the other side. The dollar's half of the hour carries a rates signature. In early trade that is still thin, Treasury futures rallied across the curve: the two-year added 4.6 basis points of price, the ten-year 21.8 and the ultra bond 65.4 — yields marked lower at every point, and at the two- and ten-year almost the entire four-hour move arrived inside this hour.

The morning's dollar bid was a rates bid, roughly 60 percent of a quarter-point hike priced for next week's Federal Reserve meeting, and this hour the rates market leaned back the other way, into Friday's inflation print — the direction Goldman Sachs has argued since mid-August, when it called the market too hawkish and a September hike very unlikely.

Nothing in that is settled; it is one hour of repricing against two weeks of hike-flavoured data. But the currency traded it immediately, and the shape of the board says how: this was a covering hour. The New Zealand dollar, all week the market's preferred short, rose on six of seven legs; the franc, the board's chosen borrow, rose on five; and the yen, the most crowded funding short in the market until last week, led everything.

The morning's shorts were bought and the morning's long was sold — which is what the first American flows of a decision-heavy week look like when they decline to inherit London's positioning. The geopolitical backdrop keeps a safety premium under the funding currencies besides: Washington struck three Iranian oil tankers over the weekend after Tehran fired ballistic missiles at American warships, and Iran's top security official said Monday that an 'exclusion zone' near the Strait of Hormuz will be announced in the coming days — though the kiwi's bounce says this hour was covering, not fleeing.

Around the edges, the euro was soft against everything except the dollar into Thursday's European Central Bank decision; the Canadian dollar handed back its midday recovery, lower on five of seven legs with Ottawa's federal budget due at 20:03 GMT; and sterling sat within a basis point and a half of flat as Bank of England testimony at 13:15 GMT — Governor Bailey among the witnesses — became the next scheduled voice.

The broken 155.20-155.25 floor is still overhead and still untested from below, but for the first time since the overnight run it got closer rather than further away. Three decisions frame everything: American inflation on Friday, the Federal Reserve on the 15th and 16th, and a Bank of Japan meeting the week after at which a hike is priced at 97 percent. The trend asked New York to vote, and the first ballots bought the yen.