Crocodilian

Dollar's Stunning Drop, Ten-Year Treasuries' Huge Rally - What's Going on?

There have been many market movements that have made me scratch my head and say "what's going on here?" Mostly, they appear to be symptoms of a market mechanism that has been damaged. One can point to many strangenesses similar to what you cite-- oil in contango and gold in backwardation come to mind.

To assume that they're symptomatic of "something" assumes that the market is roughly "continuous" offering up a price at 3 PM that's logically related to the price it offered at 2 PM

That assumption no longer applies. The pool of funds that was making the market at 2 PM may have been withdrawn, the smart young fellow who sat at a trader's desk at 2 PM may, at 3 PM, be walking out of the building with his stuff in a banker's box. Consequently, the market at 3 PM ain't the same market it was at 2 PM.

As components of the market making infrastructure fail, one side or the other of many trades are simply abandoned. This creates opportunity, but shouldn't be analyzed in a pre-2008 rubric . . . assuming that weird prices are the result of action of market participants, rather than extinction of market participants, is probably a mistake.