If a six-standard-deviation event’s a black swan, what’s a 20-sigma-event? What color swan is that? Neon?

That’s a question worth asking Monday, when the Taiwanese dollar extended an already monumental surge to post the single-biggest two-day rally against the greenback in history.

Part and parcel of penning compelling daily market commentary is embracing hyperbole. Dramatic effect’s important. Over time, the ubiquity of embellishment in such commentary desensitizes readers. Something like this: “Yeah, yeah, another ‘biggest move since’ article.” This ain’t that. Rather, this is this:

I’ve never seen anything like that and judging by the sparse FX commentary available on what, in many locales, was a holiday Monday, no one else has either. If you use the lows (which is admittedly to bastardize the calculation), the 14-day RSI for USD-Taiwan dollar was six.

There’s a lot you can say here, but first thing’s first: Taiwanese authorities are, at the very least, letting this happen. The suggestion that officials charged with stewarding an export-oriented economy would sit idly by while the local currency strengths in a 20-sigma move against the US dollar is patently absurd. If this isn’t part of someone’s plan, then where’s the central bank? If they were buying USD — and I assume they were in some measure, because obviously no one else was — they’re not doing so in a way that suggests a determination to stop the move, or really even to manage it.

That leads directly into the next point, which is simply that Taipei has pretty plainly agreed to countenance, or even facilitate, a weaker bilateral exchange rate (i.e., a weaker USD) in the interest of placating Donald Trump. Last week, Taiwan said it wrapped up trade talks with the US, and although details were sparse, I think it’s safe to say Trump secured an FX concession of some kind from Taipei, which Treasury was monitoring as part of the department’s currency manipulation identification initiative.

Lai Ching-te would rather people didn’t say any of that. On Monday, he recorded a video message denying any link between last week’s trade talks and the FX fireworks. “The cause of the Taiwan-US trade deficit has nothing to do with the exchange rate [so] the exchange rate issue will naturally not be mentioned in negotiations between Taiwan and the United States,” Lai said. Taiwan’s central bank governor issued similar denials.

Forgive me, but it beggars belief that representatives for Trump, a man pathologically obsessed with the notion that foreign countries are “manipulating” their currencies to “cheat” the US on trade, wouldn’t even broach the subject in trade discussions with a strategically critical nation that runs a large surplus with America. Note the emphasis: Taiwan’s an absolutely crucial piece of the geopolitical puzzle in the 2020s, and the AI boom raised those already sky-high stakes. Given that, it’s reasonable to assume trade negotiations with Taipei will be among the most comprehensive of all the bilateral dialogues Trump’s team will engage in over the next few weeks and months.

Is it possible that all we’re seeing in the TWD move is a rumor run amok? That someone shouted “FX concessions!” in a crowded theater and triggered a domino effect of short-covering, panic-hedging and corporate buying of local currency? Sure. But, again, the notion that the exchange rate didn’t even come up last week in trade talks with team Trump is little short of ridiculous.

And yet, that’s what Lai would have you believe. Not only that, he’s offended you’d suggest as much. So offended, in fact, he resorted to name-calling on Monday. “I would ask malevolent people to stop deliberately spreading false information,” he chided.

Lai, GTFOH, as the kids would say. You ran a record trade surplus with America last year. You depend on the US for security. The President of the United States is convinced that trade deficits are evidence of economic “rape.” The same US president has just demonstrated a willingness to abandon a besieged democracy whose sovereignty America implicitly guaranteed in the face of an invasion from an acquisitive autocrat. And Trump’s determined that one way or another, Taiwan’s semi expertise will be America’s semi expertise.

Given that — all of that — you’d be forgiven for wondering if Trump might’ve channeled Joe Pesci from Casino while conveying America’s position to Taiwan’s trade envoys and, ultimately, to Lai: “Get this through your head. You only exist out here because of us. That’s the only reason. Without us, Xi’s comin’ across that strait. Then where you gonna go? You’re warned.” And just like that, the Taiwan dollar rallies 10% over the next two days.

It seems likely to me that Taiwan agreed to let the currency strengthen, but underappreciated how quickly the situation could spiral. If that’s the case, it’s inexcusable. Everyone knows local insurers aren’t hedged on their mountainous pile of USD fixed income. And everyone should’ve known that Taiwanese exporters would freak out in the event the local-currency value of their US dollar receipts plunged overnight. Finally, it’s cheap to short TWD.

There’s no mystery then, as to what happened here. Onshore USD-selling pressure (i.e., from insurers hedging their bond portfolios and exporters buying local currency) reached critical mass, forcing levered Taiwan dollar shorts to cover, exacerbating an already dramatic situation.

To reiterate, all of those factors were recognizable ahead of time. When I hear active, professional market participants say things like, “It underscores how a pileup of less-noticed financial imbalances can elicit sharp corrections when the underlying political canvas undergoes a seismic change,” I’m at a loss. “Less-noticed financial imbalances?” Really? Taiwan lifers’ US bond holdings, and the extent to which they’re unhedged, is one of the most widely-recognized financial “imbalances” on the planet. And surely no one was under the impression exporters were fully hedged on their dollar revenues.

If there was any chance the market would be inclined to run with a rumor about a closed-door currency covenant with Trump (and if you look at Friday’s TWD move, the writing was on the wall), Taiwan should’ve, at the very least, taken steps to avoid creating an FX panic on — and this is the real punchline — a holiday in London. That’s a “whatever you do” moment: Whatever you do, don’t risk, let alone facilitate, an FX panic when London’s closed for the whole day.

So, there you go. That’s what happened in Taiwan on Monday, and I’d be remiss not to gently note that we’ll probably see more of these black swan (or neon swan or whatever color swans are when a given market move is triple the magnitude of events we typically describe as “shocks”) sessions as Trump’s bid to rewrite the rules upends legacy imbalances (“less-noticed” or otherwise) from the “old” status quo.