What Volatility Reveals: Agnostic Identification of Exchange Rate and Treasury-Market Dynamics in Inconvenient Times

Abstract

This paper studies the financial-market transmission of the April 2025 U.S. tariff announcements, with a particular focus on the unusual combination of dollar depreciation and rising long-term U.S. Treasury yields. We ask whether the market reaction can be understood as the propagation of a single tariff-announcement shock or whether it instead reflects the interaction of distinct macro-financial disturbances. To address this question, we exploit time variation in the volatility and excess kurtosis of structural shocks to recover macro-financial forces without imposing event-based restrictions or exclusion assumptions. Our results show that the initial market reaction is consistent with a conventional safe-haven shock, but this mechanism cannot account for the subsequent joint behaviour of exchange rates and long-term U.S. Treasury yields. Instead, different segments of financial markets are dominated by distinct orthogonal shocks associated with safe-haven demand, confidence in U.S. institutions, Treasury-market intermediation and changes in the convenience value of dollar-denominated safe assets.