Late last week, I said big banks need to begin pondering the consequences and fallout from a (for now hypothetical) scenario where Donald Trump orchestrates Jerome Powell’s ouster at the Fed.

The writing’s on the wall, and the letters are pretty big. Trump, working through his OMB chief, has designs on removing Powell for misleading Congress about renovations at the Marriner Eccles building. That was made even clearer on Sunday, when Kevins Hassett and Warsh made the media rounds to deride Powell’s management of the project.

I realize I’ve said this several times over the last 72 hours, but I want to say it again: The idea that Trump cares about the cost of lavish renovations at the Fed building is laughable. This is a man whose entire “career” (if you can call it that) in real estate revolved around lavish building projects. And who, while explaining a decision to accept what critics described as a $400 million flying bribe from Qatar, said, “We’re the United States of America [so] we should have the most impressive plane.” And who just a month ago put on a military parade in honor of his own birthday at a cost to taxpayers of between $15 million and $45 million.

The point is: If the Fed were cooperating with Trump on rates, he’d be the first person to argue that no cost is too great to glorify the Marriner Eccles building. And Russ Vought would (be forced to) agree. This is all about Powell not supporting rate cuts and nothing whatsoever to do with any rooftop terraces or water features being installed near Powell’s office.

If Powell could somehow marshal support on the Committee for a 150bps cut, the renovation questions would disappear overnight. I can hear it now from Trump: “Well, he was very late, and he was doing a terrible job, but he’s just done us a big favor. He’s saved our country billions and billions of dollars. Someone said $100 billion. Think of it.”

But that’s not going to happen. Powell’s not going to bend, so Trump will break him. Or try to. And in a new note, Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos walked through the potential ramifications for markets, much as ING did last week, only in a bit more depth.

If the question’s whether Trump might get away with pushing Powell aside without market fireworks, the answer in Saravelos’s opinion is “no.” “It is stating the obvious that investors would likely interpret such an event as a direct affront to Fed independence putting the central bank under extreme institutional duress,” he wrote, adding that “with the Fed sitting at the pinnacle of the global dollar monetary system it is also stating the obvious that the consequences would reverberate far beyond US borders.”

That’s really all you need to know. I’ll be the first to admit that markets sometimes exhibit an inexplicable tendency to shrug off adverse events, but it’s very difficult to imagine Powell’s ouster being anything other than a vol event of historic proportions. If it were to happen over a weekend, Monday would be total chaos from the word go in Wellington to the closing bell on Wall Street — i.e., mayhem from the first illiquid FX trades all the way through the US cash equities session.

Saravelos was keen to point out “key differences” between now and when the Fed last came under intense political pressure in the 1970s. “The US is running a much larger twin deficit and negative foreign asset position, capital markets are far more open and disproportionately skewed towards US asset allocation and the global exchange rate system is free-floating,” he wrote. “All these ingredients argue for significantly greater global disruption [and] the empirical and academic evidence on the impact of a loss of central bank independence is fairly clear: In extreme cases, both the currency and the bond market can collapse as inflation expectations move higher, real yields drop and broader risk premia increase on the back of institutional erosion.”

Plainly, the dollar and Treasurys wouldn’t “collapse” outright (i.e., in a strict, literal sense of the word) upon a potential Powell exit, but if it began to appear, in subsequent days, that Trump was angling for a wholesale overhaul by removing any and all opposition to his agenda, legality and procedural norms be damned, we could all be looking at a pretty dire picture.

As far as the initial reaction, Saravelos braved an estimate or two. “It is hard to quantify the impact on FX and rates, but on the first 24 hours of an announcement of a Powell removal we would expect a drop in the trade-weighted dollar of at least 3%-4% accompanied by a 30-40bps selloff in US fixed income led by the back-end,” he said. In other words, the USD-UST correlation would snap back sharply positive — it’d be a more acute version of what we saw in and around “Liberation Day.”

In addition, Saravelos went on, it’s likely that cross-currency bases would widen out meaningfully to reflect market concerns about “the politicization of the Fed swap lines.” As some readers will surely recall, officials in Europe started fretting about swap line access in March. Powell said there was nothing to worry about. If he goes, well… all bets are off.

Over the weekend, Andrew Bailey told the Sunday Times that the US can’t, under any circumstances, call into question the swap lines. “My answer to the US administration is, you want the dollar to remain the global reserve currency and we all really like it because we don’t want instability,” he said. “Swap lines are part of the dollar being the reserve. That is a sort of insurance on liquidity.”

Summing up his views on all this, Deutsche’s Saravelos called Powell’s potential removal “one of the largest under-priced event risks over the coming months.” The title of his note: “What if?”