🇺🇸🇯🇵🇪🇺 US euro sale to prop up yen blindsided European Central Bank

Washington’s sale of euros to boost the yen late last week blindsided the European Central Bank, with the US only informing its counterparts in Frankfurt after the historic currency intervention.

The ECB was made aware of the US’s move to sell euros to buy yen on Friday after the trade had been executed, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The lack of co-ordination highlights the unusual nature of the first joint Washington-Tokyo effort to boost the yen in almost 30 years. Typically, the US would have been expected to use dollars in such an operation.

Some senior ECB officials viewed the US’s decision to use euros in its trade as an unprecedented breach of longstanding conventions on co-operation between western monetary authorities, the people said.

📝 InvisibleFist: Selling dollars to defend the yen would have contradicted Bessent’s strong-dollar policy. Selling euros avoided that problem. But selling a European asset to defend an Asian currency to protect an American bond market, without consulting the institution whose asset was sold, is not a currency intervention. It is the reserve architecture consuming the alliance architecture.

The reason Washington intervened at all is the part nobody wants to say plainly. Japan is the largest foreign holder of US Treasuries. The yen was at its weakest since 1986. If the yen falls far enough, Japanese institutions sell their most liquid foreign asset to raise cash. That asset is Treasuries. The selling pushes American yields higher at the exact moment the thirty-year just touched 5.28 percent. Washington did not intervene to help Japan. Washington intervened to prevent the Treasury market from absorbing a forced seller at a nineteen-year high in yields.

The convention that was broken to execute this trade is the same kind of convention the reserve confiscation broke in 2022. That one taught central banks their dollar reserves were not safe from seizure. This one taught the ECB that dollar-system cooperation is not safe from unilateral action by its architect. Both lessons point the same direction: build the alternatives faster.

The fix is eating the architecture it was built to preserve.

🔗 https://archive.ph/NlSsw