Following this week’s FOMC Minutes shows, which violently repriced June rate hike odds from 4% to 30% and July from 20% to 50%, the cries of lenienecy have begun, and nobody is doing so louder than Deutsche Bank which in an overnight credit summary note tries to make it clear that “the market is not ready for a June hike.”

Why is Germany’s largest bank, whose stock price is trading just barely above 52 weeks lows and level not seen since the financial crisis so worried? Simple: “the hawkish minutes will weigh on risk, bias yields lower, and flatten the curve” for the simple reason that the Fed is so clueless it “seems to be interpreting recent easing in financial conditions as an opportunity to force rate expectations higher.” Instead, the Fed is once again confusing cause and effect, and DB says the “ease in financial conditions occurred precisely because of the Fed’s dovish turn earlier this year.” Hence why DB is confident a hawkish turn will push markets right back where they were in December and January, prior to the February Shanghai Accord.

Of course, we already gave this explanation last fall, just before the Fed’s December rate hike. It’s time to give it again, and amusingly, DB agrees because as Dominic Konstam writes, “If you think you’ve seen this movie before it’s because you have.

Alas, it is indeed deja vu all over again:

Like during 2015, the Fed appears bent on pushing rate expectations higher, and the operative question is whether the more hawkish turn to Fed rhetoric will up-end risk and tighten financial conditions to the extent that a rate hike is imprudent if not impossible given the latent fault lines in the global economy.

Last year the Fed attempted to prepare the market for a September hike at the June meeting with a decidedly negative result, and then had another go in October for the December meeting with the result that markets tolerated December lift-off before coming apart early in 2016. The operative question is whether markets are sufficiently calm for the Fed to use the June 2016 meeting to pave the way for a July hike.

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