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The United States sold euros to support the yen in what Washington described as a historic intervention, and Christine Lagarde learned about it the way the rest of the market did: after the fact.
Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, spoke with the ECB president only once the move had already landed.
That sequence says as much about how this administration manages its allies as it does about any currency view. The read-through for Europe The order of events matters here.
A decision to sell a partner currency to fund support for a third sits well outside the normal choreography of major-economy coordination. The ECB exists, among other things, to manage the stability of the euro.
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