Don’t look now, but the dollar’s on track for its best month since the “dollar wrecking ball” days of September 2022.

You remember September 2022, right? The Fed was hard at work trying to prove something about the Committee’s commitment to the inflation fight, and the accompanying dollar strength pushed the yen, the euro, the yuan and sterling (which was also grappling with Liz Truss’s short-lived stint at No. 10) to the breaking point.

As the simple figure shows, the greenback’s up more than 3% so far in October, a helluva showing to be sure.

That’s set against a backdrop of rising US yields, robust US macro data and speculation that the Fed won’t deliver nearly as much easing over the next 12 to 18 months as previously anticipated.

It also comes amid escalating bets on Donald Trump’s reelection. Indeed, some strategists attribute most of this month’s dollar strength to Trump’s allegedly favorable odds of securing a second term.

As is the case with the selloff in Treasurys (and the accompanying rise in the term premium), it’s hard to parse what’s attributable to Trump bets (and in the case of the term premium, Trump worries) and what’s explainable by the data and the repriced Fed trajectory.

There’s some interplay there: A Trump win’s expected to unleash “animal spirits” into a US economy that’s still cookin’ on its own. American exceptionalism’s in full swing as it is, and Trump’s policies would be gas on the fire. Or so goes the narrative.

Of course, what made America “exceptional” in the first instance wasn’t its economy, it was the young nation’s system of governance: America was the grandest experiment in representative government the world’s ever known. Trump’s autocratic leanings are anathema to that.

With that in mind I’ll gently note that an authoritarian turn for America, the perception that the rule of law is accordingly diminished and the prospect of a beholden central bank, isn’t exactly the stuff currency strength’s made of.

Thankfully, the dollar’s the ultimate manifestation of TINA.