Everyone was betting on rate cuts. The Fed’s new chair just said not to count on it — and Bogotá is sending the same message
Kevin Warsh, Fed chair since May, used his first Jackson Hole speech (August 28) to shut the door on any expectation of imminent cuts: core PCE inflation sits at 3.7% over twelve months and 4.1% over six, both well above the 2% target, which he called “a firm, fixed target.” He declined to give any signal on when or how much the rate would move, currently at 3.5%-3.75% since July — a decision made with three dissenters who wanted to raise it, not cut it. The echo reaches Bogotá: Colombia’s annual CPI eased to 6.03% in July (from 6.14% in June, per DANE), but the central bank’s own governor, Leonardo Villar, just admitted the 3% target won’t be reached before mid-2028 — the same rate we already flagged wasn’t going to move. For anyone making financing decisions — a mortgage, corporate debt, treasury positioning — the read is the same in dollars and in pesos: plan for elevated real rates for years, not quarters.
Stripe paid over $7 billion for a startup that doesn’t process a single payment — and that’s exactly why finance is changing
Stripe closed its acquisition of OpenRouter, the largest language-model aggregator on the market, for more than $7 billion — nearly 5.4 times the $1.3 billion valuation from its Series B round in May. OpenRouter doesn’t move money: it routes calls from thousands of applications to dozens of AI models and charges for that traffic. The world’s largest payments processor buying it confirms something European banks have already been signaling with their own numbers: Rabobank committed up to €2 billion to data infrastructure and AI over the next three years, and ABN Amro partnered with Mistral AI to keep its models “developed and governed in Europe.” For any company that depends on AI in its financial processes, the implication is direct: access to AI models is now critical infrastructure, carrying the same single-vendor risk that payment rails used to.
Wall Street celebrated record highs in August. The month’s most important speech just said it was celebrating the wrong thing
The noise: in the first week of August the S&P 500 hit a fresh record and the Dow topped 54,000 for the first time, a run much of the market read as confirmation the Fed would start cutting soon. Colombia was hearing a similar story: with inflation easing from its June peak, the expectation was that the central bank would start lowering its 12% rate before year-end.
The signal: Warsh explicitly refused to commit to any cutting roadmap and said, in his official remarks, that “the responsibility for 65 months of sustained, elevated inflation sits squarely with the central bank” — an admission that the Fed doesn’t think it has done enough yet. In July, three committee votes called for a hike, not a cut. And in Bogotá, the same central bank we already flagged wasn’t going to move just pushed its inflation target out to 2028. The real signal, in both countries, is that “higher for longer” has stopped being a rhetorical possibility and become the base case.
“The responsibility for 65 months of sustained, elevated inflation sits squarely with the central bank.”
— Kevin Warsh, Chair of the Federal Reserve, remarks at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, August 28, 2026 (official Federal Reserve transcript). This isn’t rhetorical self-criticism — it’s the justification a hawkish central bank needs to resist pressure to cut. As long as that logic holds in Washington and in Bogotá, any financial decision that depends on lower rates should have a plan B.