Purposefully devaluing the dollar to make US goods more globally marketable and hide the Japanese debt crisis is an interesting but risky strategy.
Currently, I'm glad to see a correction without panic, but it's too early to make a call on the effect on the overall global economy. Xi's already suggested making the Yuan a global reserve currency, and seeing as much debt they're holding, I'm a little worried they're able to make it happen if this is the US financial strategy.
DO NOT make financial decisions based on the advice of a youtube channel.
DO NOT make financial decisions based of of the advice of an an article written by a know associate of Curtis Yarvin.
You saw the video yesterday because this is a marketing exercise.
They hold a stake in the outcome, you are the greater fool.
Christ.
Find a professional fiduciary that doesn't have a youtube channel and never speculate more than you can afford to lose.
Everyone forgetting the more likely, more rule-of-law based fallback option for a reserve currency and international payments system (which is the important bit!): the Euro. Digital or otherwise.
Only through the first two paragraphs but a little turned off by the "everybody else is wrong, we are right and it's this one specific thing" attitude when it the topic is understanding something as complex and opaque as the global economy
>By anchoring borrowing costs at or near zero, the BOJ enabled Wall Street to borrow Yen cheaply and invest it with leverage into higher yielding instruments globally, such as U.S. treasuries, equities, and cryptography
> In short, occupywallst.org is a living archive and occasional update point for a landmark left-wing protest movement that put economic inequality and corporate power at the center of national conversation starting in 2011.
This reads like LLM slop. The "carry trade blowing up" has been written about hundreds of time before, so it's not surprising it's so prevalent in LLM training data.
This is a good analysis of the yen carry trade but i'd argue the causality is backwards. Record high margin debt in the U.S. is the root cause as it's a powder keg. The yen is just the fuse being lit. When system-wide leverage is this extreme, any funding sock (whether it's the BOJ rate hikes, hawish fed, or geopolitical event) can initiate the liquidation cascade. The yen carry trade is one source of that leverage but the fragility was baked in. If Japan didn't do anything something else would have cause the liquidation cascade, only a matter of time.
The real story isn't Tokyo, it's that Wall Street built a house of cards and ran out of steady hands.
I have a public ThetaEdge card that monitors margin debt and calculates the correlation with the S&P here:
It is a shame that jart got control of @OccupyWallSt and occupywallst.com and never gave it up. It seems like her politics and views are very out of line with many of the people who were originally involved in that movement. Repurposing occupywallst.com for something like this compared to it's origin is a big disappointing contrast. https://web.archive.org/web/20111021162924/http://www.occupy...
Anyone attempting to build a movement might find it interesting how Pumping Station One in Chicago is governed. It's a maker space but run by people who care (at least from my experience when I was a member back in 2015/2016). The process for electing leadership and holding members accountable was very democratic and fair, from my experience. They open-source as much as they can about how they organize:
Anyone doing any attempt at market analysis should lay out the trades they've made and the time frames they're talking about. So we can come back later and point a finger at them and laugh.
It seems like their conclusion is "hold lots of yen"? We'll see I guess.
Speaking as a quant that has followed this story closely for months (and was educated about the yen carry trade in my degree), this narrative is somewhat wrong and also very obviously LLM slop.
It is true that the yen carry trade is currently being unwound and that it has significant implications for nearly all holders of treasuries. But claiming that ALL of the recent volatility is due to this one event is ludicrous. There are some blatant falsities, like saying that gold and silver are historically uncorrelated??? And it’s clear that the author has a bias against the financial establishment (“monopoly money”), coloring the output.
That said, there are legitimately interesting bits here I didn’t know about, like the Japanese institutional liquidation of US treasuries. I would not repeat this information to others without fact checking it, but if accurately described it’s an important space to watch. It’s not surprising that the LLM would get some things right, of course.
One big problem with this article is the clear prompt given to connect x current event to the yen carry trade, like Warsh’s nomination and the Greenland nonsense. This creates a lot of noise. It’s basically the LLM looking for a pattern between these things instead of identifying a structural flow. It might not even be wrong, but it’s horribly biased towards finding a fake pattern, so I would never trust it.
For the tech heads in HN that are excited to see a Justine Tunney post: don’t go crazy. If you’re really interested in learning about the unwinding of the yen carry trade, there’s plenty of information from actual experts to read about, not this slop.
We're deep in an era where "finance cosplay" is a thing. Wallstreetbets, zerohedge, the memestock subreddits. And daytrading apps to go along with that, like Robinhood. The trick is to realize that most market discussion you're not paying for is itself marketing at best and cosplay at worst. People doing this stuff professionally have Bloomberg terminals. Do not attempt to compete with Bloomberg Chat.
I am also veeery suspicious of monocausal finance explanations. There's simply a lot going on. The Greenland nonsense will definitely have moved the needle somehow; while a token deal was made to get it out of the media and allow all the insiders to front-run it, some very real changes are now going to happen over a longer period in order to decouple from US risk.
>Following the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, U.S. markets opened on January 20 to a bloodbath. The S&P 500 fell 2.1%, the Nasdaq composite dropped 2.4%,
Should someone that calls 2.4 percent movement bloodbath be taken seriously?
Anger about the 2008 bailout makes sense. Yen carry unwind deserves attention. However, the trading call to action fails on market structure.
Key counterpoints:
- Global FX turnover runs near $9.6T per day (BIS, April 2025). A retail wave of calls will not move USD/JPY in a durable way at that scale.
- /6J options settle on /6J futures. When you buy calls, you mostly push dealer delta hedging into futures, then dealers unwind as exposure changes. No sustained spot yen demand comes from that flow.
- FXY calls track an ETF wrapper, not spot.
- “Widowmaker trade” most often refers to repeated losses from shorting Japanese government bonds, not a long-yen crowd squeeze.
It cost the taxpayers nothing (in fact it made us money), it destroyed 4 of the 5 largest investment banks in the US, and it sent over 200 bankers, brokers, and auditors to jail.
People are mad because the government bailed out banks over people, the last time this happened FDR bailed out people over the banks.
If you can't understand why people are angry that the government continues to give away large amounts of corporate welfare without protecting people, then I'd definitely read up on people movements because a few are brewing across the country and all of them want blood.
More generally, be very suspicious when someone offers you investing advice dressed up as a call for solidarity and revolution. It’s intellectually dishonest and emotionally manipulative.
Can anyone recommend a good source to ramp up one's understanding of macroeconomics/monetary policy to a point where they can make sense of this? Starting from more or less a layman's understanding. Could be a book or course, but doesn't have to be university quality, a good blog or youtube channel could do.
It‘s really hard to read this article, it smells of LLM generated slop once you get past the first couple of paragraphs - lots of negative parallelisms and lots of words without adding value to the sentence:
> To validate the thesis that the Yen unwind is the primary driver of volatility, we must examine the sequence of events. The crash did not happen in a vacuum; it followed a precise timeline …
> It wasn't just about rates anymore; it was about the stability of the U.S.-led global order
> The unwinding of a carry trade is not a monolithic event; it is a cascade that ripples outward
It‘s like almost in every paragraph. I don’t understand why this gets to be on the frontpage to be honest. It just reads horrible even if some of the points may be true (or hallucinated, who knows)
I have a sense that were in a moment of mass hysteria.
You dot even understand what your reading anymore. Cant tell whether you're reading a hallucination or someones thoughts.
"I don't agree / understand this, it must not be real!"
Now, you have to wonder: is my grammar just poor? Or did I intentionally inject spelling and grammar errors into the output or an llm? Is it in my system prompt to do this?
Sounds good, too bad I only have $5k available. Even if I spend all on FXY it won't gain that much from the current $58.6 in the forseeable future. Rich get richer I guess so nothing changes just the location.
50 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 87.7 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ws8Grsc4jU
Purposefully devaluing the dollar to make US goods more globally marketable and hide the Japanese debt crisis is an interesting but risky strategy.
Currently, I'm glad to see a correction without panic, but it's too early to make a call on the effect on the overall global economy. Xi's already suggested making the Yuan a global reserve currency, and seeing as much debt they're holding, I'm a little worried they're able to make it happen if this is the US financial strategy.
Christ.
Find a professional fiduciary that doesn't have a youtube channel and never speculate more than you can afford to lose.
Think you mean crypto currency here?
Is this true?
40% pullback but still up 150% over the past year..
The real story isn't Tokyo, it's that Wall Street built a house of cards and ran out of steady hands.
I have a public ThetaEdge card that monitors margin debt and calculates the correlation with the S&P here:
https://thetaedge.ai/public/thetix-card/42d9c6de-218d-4627-a...
https://wiki.pumpingstationone.org/wiki/Do-ocracy
https://wiki.pumpingstationone.org/wiki/Member_Manual
https://wiki.pumpingstationone.org/wiki/Administration
It seems like their conclusion is "hold lots of yen"? We'll see I guess.
It is true that the yen carry trade is currently being unwound and that it has significant implications for nearly all holders of treasuries. But claiming that ALL of the recent volatility is due to this one event is ludicrous. There are some blatant falsities, like saying that gold and silver are historically uncorrelated??? And it’s clear that the author has a bias against the financial establishment (“monopoly money”), coloring the output.
That said, there are legitimately interesting bits here I didn’t know about, like the Japanese institutional liquidation of US treasuries. I would not repeat this information to others without fact checking it, but if accurately described it’s an important space to watch. It’s not surprising that the LLM would get some things right, of course.
One big problem with this article is the clear prompt given to connect x current event to the yen carry trade, like Warsh’s nomination and the Greenland nonsense. This creates a lot of noise. It’s basically the LLM looking for a pattern between these things instead of identifying a structural flow. It might not even be wrong, but it’s horribly biased towards finding a fake pattern, so I would never trust it.
For the tech heads in HN that are excited to see a Justine Tunney post: don’t go crazy. If you’re really interested in learning about the unwinding of the yen carry trade, there’s plenty of information from actual experts to read about, not this slop.
That should have been more than obvious from the domain name and the logo at the top already.
I am also veeery suspicious of monocausal finance explanations. There's simply a lot going on. The Greenland nonsense will definitely have moved the needle somehow; while a token deal was made to get it out of the media and allow all the insiders to front-run it, some very real changes are now going to happen over a longer period in order to decouple from US risk.
Should someone that calls 2.4 percent movement bloodbath be taken seriously?
Key counterpoints:
- Global FX turnover runs near $9.6T per day (BIS, April 2025). A retail wave of calls will not move USD/JPY in a durable way at that scale.
- /6J options settle on /6J futures. When you buy calls, you mostly push dealer delta hedging into futures, then dealers unwind as exposure changes. No sustained spot yen demand comes from that flow.
- FXY calls track an ETF wrapper, not spot.
- “Widowmaker trade” most often refers to repeated losses from shorting Japanese government bonds, not a long-yen crowd squeeze.
Does it?
It cost the taxpayers nothing (in fact it made us money), it destroyed 4 of the 5 largest investment banks in the US, and it sent over 200 bankers, brokers, and auditors to jail.
What part of that are people mad about, and why?
If you can't understand why people are angry that the government continues to give away large amounts of corporate welfare without protecting people, then I'd definitely read up on people movements because a few are brewing across the country and all of them want blood.
What's your source?
Now they act like they’re doing us a favor by negotiating to sell a vehicle only a little above sticker price.
Excuse me while I vomit…
Imagine how deceptive llm slop contents are to the general population.
> To validate the thesis that the Yen unwind is the primary driver of volatility, we must examine the sequence of events. The crash did not happen in a vacuum; it followed a precise timeline …
> It wasn't just about rates anymore; it was about the stability of the U.S.-led global order
> The unwinding of a carry trade is not a monolithic event; it is a cascade that ripples outward
It‘s like almost in every paragraph. I don’t understand why this gets to be on the frontpage to be honest. It just reads horrible even if some of the points may be true (or hallucinated, who knows)
You dot even understand what your reading anymore. Cant tell whether you're reading a hallucination or someones thoughts.
"I don't agree / understand this, it must not be real!"
Now, you have to wonder: is my grammar just poor? Or did I intentionally inject spelling and grammar errors into the output or an llm? Is it in my system prompt to do this?
> used by a generation of investors
How short is a generation for investors? Aren't we near 20 year highs as far as US bond rates?
I guess the point is that this is more about the Yen than about US bonds?
"support my thesis and ignore alternative explanations and contrary evidence on whether there's even a there, there" AI-research slop.