Wall Street’s beginning to think the unthinkable. And to say it aloud, just not always in so many words.

The Fed’s at serious risk of becoming overtly politicized which — and I really can’t emphasize this enough — is something distinct from the tacit, behind-the-scenes political pressure the Fed’s always subjected to as a quasi(mostly)-public entity with a Board appointed by the president.

Make no mistake: Everyone who counts themselves a macro-market aficionado understands that Donald Trump’s Fed encroachments are something different from the machinations of historical presidents who’ve sought to sway the Fed.

Not everyone concedes as much in their writing, though. Some even go out of their way to pretend this isn’t what we all know it is. Those folks are cowards and in a lot of cases they can be forgiven. After all, they don’t sign their own paychecks. You gotta put food on the table, and in autocratic states that sometimes means keeping mum.

Last month, Trump threatened, obliquely, to have Jan Hatzius fired from Goldman and the right-wing mediasphere showed itself ready and willing to assist in those sorts of pressure campaigns against Wall Street economists who don’t toe the party line. On August 15, Charlie Gasparino, writing for The New York Post, described Hatzius as a “Lefty.”

So, I don’t envy Wall Street here. You have to find a way to say what needs to be said without rankling The White House, because this time around (i.e., in Trump “2.0”) the threat to your financial well-being for criticizing the administration is at least a little bit real. And that’s real enough.

With that in mind, JPMorgan’s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou this week said the bank sees “evidence” in its positioning metrics that markets “have become more concerned over Fed independence.” The two red lines in the figures below correspond to the announcement that Stephen Miran would be stepping into Adriana Kugler’s vacant Fed Board seat and the onset of the Lisa Cook drama.

On the left, you can see that short interest in a popular ETF tracking Treasurys dated three- to seven- years (the blue line) took a leg lower after the Miran news and collapsed entirely when Bill Pulte gave Trump an excuse to go after Cook’s Board seat. Short interest in the most popular long-end ETF (the black line) rose after the Miran announcement, fell, then rose again when it became apparent that the administration was determined to orchestrate Cook’s ouster.

“[The] drop in short interest in the IEI relative to short interest in TLT suggest[s] an increase in steepeners consistent with the ‘Fed independence trade,'” Panigirtzoglou remarked, adding that the discernible uptick in gold longs towards the end of last month (the black line in the figure on the right) could also be a “manifestation of the ‘Fed independence trade.'”

Of course, more aggressive gold positioning could also be a “manifestation” of traders piling into a momentum trade which earlier this week saw bullion hit a fresh all-time high. But even if that’s the case, it’s still an expression of the same general concerns. After all, gold’s record run is in part attributable to fiscal dominance worries which are related, tangentially at least, to central bank independence jitters.

Speaking of gold and Fed independence, Goldman’s Samantha Dart said this week that bullion could rise to almost $5,000 in the event private investors re-allocate just 1% of their Treasury holdings in a scenario where the macro-politico backdrop causes duration to underperform.

“A scenario where Fed independence is damaged would likely lead to higher inflation, lower stock and long-dated bond prices and an erosion of the dollar’s reserve-currency status,” Dart wrote. Gold, she reminded clients, “is a store of value that doesn’t rely on institutional trust.”