Last week, I said the dollar “wrecking ball” was back.

From a kind of “feel the market” perspective (to quote one former US president) the situation doesn’t seem as acute as it did this time last year, when Jerome Powell was busy trying to convince everyone how deadly serious the Fed was about the inflation fight. In essence, the message was that beating back inflation in the US came first, and any collateral damage from attendant dollar strength fell in the “you gotta break a few eggs” category. Even if that collateral damage entailed deep-sixing entire foreign economies through FX-driven terms of trade shocks.

We’re not back to that, but the greenback’s latest run of gains nevertheless put Chinese and Japanese authorities in a bind reminiscent of their predicament from 12 months ago. And they responded.

China, in true Tony Soprano fashion, effectively threatened to harm anyone caught misbehaving in FX. Market participants should “resolutely avoid behaviors that disturb market orders such as conducting speculative trades,” the central bank warned. Amusingly, the PBoC said authorities shouldn’t have to ask. Market participants should maintain order “voluntarily.”

Monday’s yuan fix was 1,243 pips to the strong side versus estimates. That was another record. You’re reminded that the recent FX reserve requirement cut goes into effect this week, which should help the yuan at the margins.

The PBoC tried to engineer a short squeeze on Monday, according to some media reports. State banks sold dollars and apparently kept at it until they stopped out yuan bears. The end result was the best day for the Chinese currency in nearly two months.

If you’re inclined to suggest that’s not the kind of behavior that’s consistent with a country keen to internationalize its currency and instill confidence in the idea of open capital markets and transparency, you’re not wrong.

Meanwhile, Japan opted for a more subtle approach to stabilizing its currency. Kazuo Ueda over the weekend said that by the end of the year, the BoJ may be in a position to determine if recent gains for wages are conducive to a sustainable inflation impulse. If so, it’s possible the era of negative rates could end. That was enough to bolster the yen. For a day at least.

In a testament to the BoJ’s reluctance to give markets an inch lest they should take a mile, the bank also took steps to cap a bond selloff triggered by Ueda’s comments. Rather than up the size of bond-buying (which risked negating the currency strength Ueda was plainly trying to engineer), the BoJ used another tool (a loans-for-bonds scheme).

As a quick reminder: The dollar is riding an eight-week stretch of gains. On Bloomberg’s index, that’s the longest run in 18 years.

There are multiple factors in play, including economic divergence (e.g., US-China) and policy divergence (e.g., US-Japan). Notwithstanding the distant prospect of a Japanese rate hike and an improvement in China’s monthly credit growth+, nothing changed fundamentally on Monday. Dollar weakness was a function of verbal intervention abroad.