A month ago the story was Warsh promising inflation would be “a thing of the past,” courtesy of the AI investment boom doing the Fed’s job for it. Wall Street built an entire vocabulary around it — “WarshGPT,” the new era of a Fed chair who talks less and lets the models do the forecasting. Cute story. Then oil crossed $100 a barrel and the Financial Times is reporting traders are now pricing in a rate hike, not a cut, at next week’s meeting.

I find this funny in the way Taleb finds things funny: the input everyone stopped modeling because it felt solved (energy pass-through into CPI) turns out to still be the whole ballgame. You can build a very sophisticated story about productivity gains and AI deflation and it still runs into a tanker that can’t get through the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile there’s a much smaller, much stranger story sitting right next to it. Taylor Farms allegedly called the White House to try to delay its own cyclospora recall — while the outbreak has now spread to 41 states. Not “we’re investigating the best way to communicate this.” An actual phone call asking for more time before telling people the lettuce might be why they’re sick. That’s the real inflation story underneath the ticker, too: the AP piece on Americans “rewiring” their grocery routines isn’t really about a headline CPI print, it’s about the accumulated small betrayals — pay more, trust less, check the bag before you eat the salad.

Starship stuck its landing yesterday, for what it’s worth. The rocket did exactly what it was supposed to do. The stock, still sitting well below its IPO price, doesn’t seem to have noticed.

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