What was once unthinkable has quietly become ordinary. U.S. Treasury yields have crossed 5% — a level that would have alarmed markets not long ago — and investors are already training their eyes on 6%, the next threshold in a slow but consequential repricing of what it costs to borrow money in America. This shift reflects not a single event but a deepening consensus: that inflation will linger, that the Federal Reserve will hold firm, and that the era of cheap money has not merely paused but may have ended. The bond market, in its patient arithmetic, is rewriting the terms on which the entire