In mid-September 2026, Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari offered a sobering assessment: inflation in the American economy has ceased to be a story about oil prices and has become a story about everything else. Speaking as one of the Fed's most prominent voices, Kashkari signaled that the central bank's long campaign against rising prices is far from over, even as the broader economy has shown a quiet, stubborn resilience. His words remind us that the most difficult problems are rarely the ones that arrive loudly — they are the ones that settle in and refuse to leave.