This week, three of the world's most consequential financial institutions — the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, and the Bank of England — convene to wrestle with an inflation that has outlasted their earlier efforts to subdue it. Their decisions, arriving between September 14 and 18, are less about numbers than about the lived conditions of millions: the cost of a mortgage, the weight of a grocery bill, the availability of a job. In the long human struggle to govern the invisible forces of money, this week offers another chapter in which the choices of a few rooms echo across continents.