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For the first time since the overnight run, the yen was bought against a rising American curve. Into the New York afternoon the yen rose a median 12.2 basis points against all seven of its major counterparts, with no Japanese release anywhere near the window — and this hour the rates market offered it nothing.

The two-year note future slipped 2.3 basis points of price, the ten-year 11.6 and the ultra bond 25.6, yields marked higher at every tenor after the day's three-year auction stopped at 4.474 percent against 4.291 at the previous sale — the opening act of a heavy issuance stretch.

All day the tape has kept one rule: when American yields back up, the yen gets sold. The London give-back hours ran on exactly that metronome, and two hours ago a yields-up hour handed the dollar every cross on the board. This hour the rule failed. The curve sold off, led from the American side — German yields fell relative to Treasuries at both the ten- and thirty-year points — and the yen rose anyway, on every leg, which is what it looks like when the bid stops borrowing the rates market's conviction and stands on its own.

The case it stands on keeps compounding rather than changing: money markets now put 97 percent on a quarter-point Bank of Japan hike on the 18th, up from 52 a month ago; ING and DBS both attributed the rally in Tuesday notes to an accelerating carry unwind, with the break below 155 having triggered a fresh leg of short covering from leveraged funds and real-money accounts alike; and behind all of it stands August's coordinated Washington-Tokyo intervention on the yen's side, which both finance ministries have since called beneficial.

The geometry of the hour names the loser: the franc. Offered on all seven of its legs, it handed the yen 16.5 basis points — the board's largest cell — and even gave 2.5 to a dollar that fell against everything else, restoring the franc to the borrow's chair one hour after its covering bid unwound.

When the two funding currencies split this cleanly — the crowd's preferred short sold, the crowd's crowded long bought through hostile rates weather — the flow reads as conviction rather than covering, and this is the first hour today that description fits. Elsewhere the board is quiet and waiting on Ottawa.

The Canadian dollar was the hour's firmest, up on six of its seven legs — every one but the yen's — into the federal budget at 20:03 GMT, still carrying the oil bid with crude at six-week highs on the Strait of Hormuz standoff; sterling drifted fractionally firm after testimony that changed nothing; the euro, the aussie and the kiwi sat within a couple of basis points of flat.

The broken 155.20-155.25 floor remains overhead and untested from below. One hour does not settle the referendum — American inflation still lands Friday, and roughly 60 percent of a Federal Reserve hike is still priced for the 15th and 16th — but for one hour, at seven-month highs, the yen did not ask the Treasury market's permission, and that is new.