ING Think and The Dark Side Of The Boom agree the Fed and BoJ cycles have further to run. They part on what the BoJ hike actually bought, and FX picked a side.
Both desks with material in this window have the Fed mid-cycle, not finished. The Dark Side Of The Boom is explicit: Kevin Warsh has delivered the first hike, and the harder question is how far this cycle has to travel, with history and neutral rate math pointing to more. ING Think went further and changed its Fed and ECB calls outright. Its CEE and CCA week ahead puts labour markets, confidence data and interest rates in focus, and its Asia week ahead flags Indonesia's rate decision alongside data for China, Taiwan and Singapore.
Nobody here is calling the cycle over. The argument is entirely about distance, not direction.
The same BoJ hike reads two ways. ING Think frames it plainly: the Bank of Japan is playing catch-up with the Fed. That is a story about convergence, the yen slowly getting a central bank that moves in the Fed's direction. The Dark Side Of The Boom reads the identical event and lands somewhere else. It says the BoJ needed to pole vault the Fed's hawkish bar, and that FX says it missed the jump. Same hike. Opposite implication.
That is the real split, and it is desk against market rather than desk against desk. Both desks accept a hike landed. FX judged it insufficient, and the desks are deferring to that verdict rather than disputing it. Where they genuinely diverge is gold, and only one of them has a view worth quoting. Goldman Sachs is not backing away from its structural gold call after Warsh's first hike, per The Dark Side Of The Boom. A hiking cycle that fails to break gold is the pattern most people assume is dead.
Read the two BoJ items together and the argument writes itself. A hike the market refuses to reward is a hike the market has not priced. ING's catch-up framing looks generous next to that FX reaction, and FX gets the last word because it settles the bill.
The through-line across this window is that the market keeps treating each hike as terminal while the desks keep moving the terminal higher. ING changing its Fed and ECB calls is the clearest admission of it. Warsh's first move was never going to settle anything, and the neutral rate math that the desk cites says the gap is wider than one meeting.
FX is where this shows up first, and the yen is the test case. If Tokyo cannot move the yen with a hike in hand, the market has already decided the Fed's cycle runs longer than Japan's. That says more about the dollar than anything in the Fed's own statement.
One more item from the same window is worth holding. Simon White makes the case that the long bond's real problem is the basis trade, not an AI apocalypse. Different plumbing, same conclusion: the pressure sits in positioning, not narrative.
Watch whether FX keeps punishing BoJ hikes, because a second miss in the same direction is a regime rather than a reaction. ING has CEE and CCA labour market and confidence data landing alongside interest rate decisions, and an Asia week that includes Indonesia's rate call. Watch whether gold holds its bid through a hiking cycle, which is the cleanest test of the Goldman call. And watch the long bond, where the basis trade is doing more work than any AI headline.