Whether or not it turns out to be justified, hype and anticipation have been building over this week's FOMC Minutes for over a week now.  The hype concerns the notion that the Fed Minutes will show a Fed board that is somewhat closer to tapering QE3 than the current market consensus might suggest.  Recent Fed speakers, though not all of them, have added to the hype by suggesting tapering could begin this summer.  Some of them have rested their hats on the verisimilitude of a housing recovery, saying it makes more sense to pull back on MBS first if housing is heating up.  

The other side of last week's coin and of the hyper in general, is the possibility that the Minutes show broader consensus that things are as they should be--that is to say the FOMC is "staying the course" on QE and needs to see "more" before scaling back on bond buying programs.  There really hasn't been much reason to doubt this would be the case, but a few seeds of fear have been planted, and now even the skeptics must wait for Wednesday, just in case they're wrong.

Conveniently, waiting for Wednesday is fairly easy considering there's really nothing going on until then--at least not in terms of scheduled economic data that normally moves markets.  Even then, tradeflows and technical levels have had just as much, if not more of an impact over the past week.  After all, pre-positioning for various Fed policy possibilities certainly isn't concerned with any silly old Jobless Claims or Consumer Sentiment data.  While bond markets moved in the directions suggested by the outcomes of those data sets, they only did so with pencil-thin lines hiding inside broader brushstrokes.  Here's where the brush might wander depending on how much of the Hype is delivered on Wednesday (naturally, this is a chart of Treasuries, so if there's different treatment given to MBS in the Minutes, and markets are reacting in different ways, we'll chart those divergences.  For now, this is just to illustrate the thematic possibility of "central" to "outer"):