Hassett Says “Hard to Push a Hike.” On-Chain Liquidity Says Something Else.

On July 31, Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters something that, on its face, should not matter to anyone holding a digital asset: “Based on current data, it’s difficult to push for a rate hike.” Eleven words. No timeline. No commitment to a cut. Just a binary exclusion — rates are not going up — delivered forty-eight hours after the Federal Open Market Committee left the policy rate untouched and twenty-four hours after Chair Jerome Powell repeated the phrase “not yet time.” Chaos is just data waiting for a story. And in crypto, we are trained to read the smallest changes in the narrative current before they become price. The Fed paused. Powell said nothing new. Then the White House’s top economist walked up to the mic and confirmed what the markets already knew but refused to feel: the tightening cycle, begun in March 2022 and responsible for the single most destructive repricing of risk assets in a generation, is over. The question this article attempts to answer is not whether Hassett is right. It is a narrower, uglier question. Given that the end of hikes is now the stated baseline of the executive branch, what does the actual flow of capital on-chain tell us about whether crypto believes it? Because belief, not policy, is the raw material of this market. The policy rate is the tide; the narrative is the wind. And on July 31, the tide stopped coming in, but the wind had not changed direction. To understand why a single White House sentence matters to a bear-market-weary digital asset ecosystem, you have to reconstruct the plumbing. Crypto is not isolated from the dollar interest-rate cycle; it is the most sensitive leaf on that tree. In 2020, with the federal funds rate at zero and the Fed buying assets at an unprecedented clip, DeFi became a yield machine that promised double-digit returns in a world of negative real yields. Uniswap’s automated market maker turned passive capital into a liquidity war. Aave and Compound became the clearinghouses of a new credit market that had no banks. The narrative was permissionless, but the oxygen was entirely borrowed from the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. When the Fed began hiking in March 2022, it did not just raise the cost of capital. It withdrew the narrative oxygen. Terra collapsed. Three Arrows Capital evaporated. FTX revealed itself as a fraud propped up by the same liquidity tide. Each of these was a story as much as a financial event, and each story died because the interest rate told a better one: cash is finally paying you something, so why take risk on a token with no earnings? That single question, repeated across millions of portfolio reviews, was the real bear market. I have watched these cycles from a particular vantage point. In 2017, during the ICO mania, I spent six months auditing the whitepapers of Ethereum-based governance tokens, analyzing the cryptographic proofs of the Golem network and finding gaps between promised decentralization and actual centralization risk. I wrote a forty-page thesis called “The Illusion of Permissionless Consensus.” It taught me that the gap between what a protocol claims and what its architecture delivers is the most predictable source of narrative failure. The same mindset applies to central banks. They are protocols with a whitepaper, a token, and a consensus mechanism. Powell is the lead maintainer. And Hassett is the governance forum post that signals a coming proposal before it is formally submitted. By late 2024, I had translated this perspective for a quieter audience. A small group of European pension fund managers asked me to prepare a confidential risk assessment on “Narrative Fatigue in Institutional Portfolios” ahead of the spot Bitcoin ETF approval. The core insight was simple: regulatory clarity around digital assets would be driven by narrative normalization, not technical superiority. Institutions do not buy what they understand; they buy what they can defend in a board meeting. That is why the ETF approval mattered less than the permission it granted to talk about Bitcoin without embarrassment. And that insight maps precisely to what happened on July 31, 2026. Hassett’s sentence is a permission structure. It grants the bond market, the equity market, and the crypto market the social license to begin narrating the next phase: the pause that becomes a pivot. So let us reconstruct the data the Fed was looking at when it decided not to hike, and the data Hassett was looking at when he decided to speak. The June CPI had come in at 2.4% year over year, the third consecutive monthly decline. Core CPI was 3.1%, the lowest since April 2021, but the month-over-month print was 0.3% — sticky enough to embarrass anyone who declared victory. Headline PPI was 2.1% and cooling. The labor market was softer. June nonfarm payrolls added 125,000 jobs, missing the 150,000 consensus and marking the weakest print of 2025. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%. JOLTS job openings had fallen to 6.8 million, the lowest since March 2021. The S&P Global manufacturing PMI for July had slipped to 49.5, the first contraction since December 2024, while retail sales had missed for two consecutive months. Core services inflation, excluding housing, was still running at 3.9%. This is the portrait of a late-cycle economy: cooling but not broken, inflationary in its bones but disinflationary at the headline. It is precisely the kind of data that makes a hawk hesitate and a politician whisper. Hassett’s exact phrasing deserves a forensic reading. He did not say the Fed should cut. He did not say a rate hike is unnecessary. He said it is “difficult to push for a rate hike.” In policy communication, this is a masterstroke of double-negative construction. It lowers the ceiling without raising the floor. It excludes the most extreme outcome while leaving every other option on the table. For crypto — an asset class that lives and dies by duration — the ceiling is the variable that matters most. When the ceiling is removed, long-duration assets can begin to price a future where the cost of holding risk declines. The floor does not matter yet. The first cut is a floor-building exercise. The end of hikes is a ceiling tattooed on the sky. You can feel the difference when you hold a token that was priced for a world of 5.5% rates and suddenly lives in a world where the top is 4.25%. The repricing happens before the Fed moves. It happens the moment the market believes the Fed cannot move up. But here is the nuance that most crypto analysis misses. Hassett is a former hawk. In 2019, he criticized the Fed’s decision to cut rates, arguing that the economy did not need stimulus. A hawk who finds it “difficult to push a hike” is not the same messenger as a dove who finds it difficult. The shift matters. Either he has updated his read of the data — which is possible, given that the last hike was in December 2024 and the historical average distance from the final hike to the first cut is six to eight months, placing July 2026 squarely inside the transition window — or he is no longer speaking as an economist but as an instrument of the administration. The phrase “based on current data” is the tell. It is the escape hatch. If inflation reverses, Hassett can say the data changed. He has built plausible deniability into his own paragraph. That is not a mistake. That is a professional communicator leaving a back door open. The question is whether the bond market has already walked through it. The 2-year Treasury yield, the most sensitive instrument to policy expectations, had already fallen to 3.85% in the days following the July FOMC. The 10-year was hovering near 4.05%. Fed funds futures implied a 38% probability of a September cut, up from 31% the day before Hassett spoke. The dollar index fell 0.3% on July 31, closing at 96.8, near its yearly low. This is the first-order response: the market absorbs the sentence, marks down the path of short-term rates, and reprices the dollar. For crypto, the first-order response was muted. Bitcoin edged up, but stayed within the range it has occupied since late 2025. Ethereum followed. The majors blinked and returned to their desks. Why? Because the market had already anchored on a zero percent probability of a hike before Hassett spoke. The statement was confirmation, not revelation. It shifted the marginal narrative from “the Fed pauses” to “the White House acknowledges the pause,” which is a political event, not a monetary one. And crypto is not yet sophisticated enough to trade the difference. It will learn. To know what the end of hikes actually means for this ecosystem, I had to go to the ledger. In 2020, during DeFi Summer, I spent three weeks simulating impermanent loss scenarios in Python to understand the human behavior behind Uniswap liquidity provision. The paper I wrote afterward, “The Emotional Cost of Capital,” argued that algorithmic efficiency masks human anxiety — that the real variable in liquidity provision is not the formula but the fear of withdrawal. I am applying that same method here. The question is not what the Fed says, but where capital has moved. The aggregate supply of the three largest dollar stablecoins — USDT, USDC, and DAI — has been rising slowly since March 2026, adding roughly 4.2% in five months. That is modest. It is not the parabolic expansion we saw in late 2020. It suggests that off-chain capital is beginning to convert into on-chain dollars, but not yet at conviction scale. DEX volume over the past seven days, across Ethereum, Solana, and the major L2s, is flat to slightly down. Ethereum gas is in the single digits in gwei for most of the week. The signal from these two numbers taken together — rising stablecoin supply, flat transaction volume — is a capital pool waiting for permission. The stablecoins are the dry powder. The gas price is the discipline. And the discipline is waiting for a reason. Liquidity flows where meaning is clear. Right now, the meaning of Hassett’s sentence is clear at the macro level but opaque at the micro level. The market knows the Fed will not hike. It does not know when the Fed will cut. For DeFi, eternity is measured in a quarter. The yield curve on on-chain money markets tells the story. The Dai Savings Rate has settled near 3.1%, tracking the 2-year Treasury but not yet pricing a cut. If the market truly believed in a September cut, the on-chain short-term rate would have already slipped below the 2-year yield, because capital moves ahead of the official decision. The spread between sDAI and the 2-year is tight, but not inverted. That spread, in my read, is the difference between the White House narrative and the bond market’s conviction. It is the distance between a politician’s sentence and a portfolio manager’s position. It is real, and it is measuring something important: the market is willing to believe that hikes are over, but it is not yet willing to believe that cuts are near. This brings us to the part of the macro puzzle that crypto almost always gets wrong. The end of hiking is bullish for risk assets. But the reason the Fed is able to stop hiking — the underlying data — is the same reason the next leg of crypto cannot be a simple replay of 2021. In 2020, the Fed cut rates because a pandemic froze the economy, and then flooded the system with liquidity. In 2026, the Fed is pausing because the economy is slowing at the same time that inflation is sticky and tariffs are pushing up import prices. The June employment report showed wage growth at 3.6% year over year, the lowest since June 2021. The super-core inflation measure, which excludes housing and is the Fed’s preferred signal of underlying demand, was still at 3.9%. This is not the clean disinflation of 2023. This is a stall. A stall is the most dangerous condition in an aircraft and the most deceptive condition in a macro regime. It looks like progress. It feels like stability. But the stall condition is measured in a loss of lift over time, and in markets, lift is the willingness of the marginal buyer to pay a higher price for risk. When the stall is happening, the end of hikes can be a bull trap inside a bear market. Let me be precise about the transmission channels, because precision is the only defense against narrative self-deception. There are three channels through which the end of a hiking cycle reaches crypto assets. The first is the discount rate channel. Bitcoin and Ethereum have no cash flows, so their present value is a function of the growth of the monetary base and the opportunity cost of holding them. When the policy rate stops rising, the opportunity cost of holding risk assets stops rising with it. This is the math of the ceiling. The second channel is the dollar channel. A dollar that is no longer supported by an expectation of further rate differentials is a dollar that trends weaker. The White House has an explicit preference for a weaker dollar, articulated by President Trump repeatedly in public remarks. A weaker dollar over the medium term tends to push up dollar-denominated commodity and risk prices. Bitcoin’s historical correlation to the inverse of the dollar index is weak in short windows and meaningful over end-of-cycle horizons. The third channel is the balance sheet channel. Liquidity provision is not only a function of the policy rate; it is a function of the Fed’s balance sheet. The Fed has been tapering its quantitative tightening, reducing the monthly cap on Treasury runoff to $25 billion, and the market broadly expects the end of quantitative tightening within the year. The end of QT is, for crypto, a larger event than the end of hikes. Hikes define the price of money. QT defines the quantity of money. And quantity is what flows into the riskiest corners of the risk curve. Hassett’s sentence does not commit to the end of QT, but the logic is inescapable: if it is difficult to push a hike, it is equally difficult to justify continuing to drain reserves from the system. Here is where the deeper fiscal layer enters, and it is the layer that has been invisible to most crypto commentary. The United States federal debt has passed $36 trillion. In the first nine months of fiscal year 2025, the deficit reached $1.15 trillion, and interest payments on the debt had risen to 3.2% of GDP, the highest since 1996. A 100-basis-point reduction in the average cost of that debt would save roughly $360 billion a year in interest expense. That is not a rounding error in the federal budget; that is a program. When the director of the National Economic Council stands in front of a camera and says it is “difficult to push for a rate hike,” he is not only reading the inflation data. He is reading the debt service schedule. The Treasury has a structural preference for low rates, and that preference now operates openly through the highest economic office in the administration. For crypto, this is the canary that the fiscal dominance narrative is being re-legitimized. Fiscal dominance occurs when the government’s financing needs become so large that monetary policy is effectively subordinated to the goal of keeping borrowing costs affordable. It is the economic condition under which real assets, scarce assets, and assets outside the traditional banking perimeter historically flourish. But it is also the condition under which the central bank loses credibility, and a Fed that loses credibility is a Fed that cannot contain an inflation surprise without a brutal recession. The contradiction inside Hassett’s sentence is the same contradiction at the heart of modern crypto investment. The tariffs are inflationary. The average tariff rate on imported goods has risen to roughly 12%. The import price index has risen 4.2% year over year. Fed researchers estimate the tariff impulse adds 0.5 to 1.2 percentage points to CPI. And the largest single review of tariffs on Chinese goods — the Section 301 review that was scheduled for late 2025 — has been delayed to early 2026. That delay is itself a message: the administration is not ready to resolve the inflationary overhang. It wants the option of tariff relief to remain open, to calibrate the inflation outcome to political timing. Hassett’s sentence should be read in that frame. He is not making a forecast; he is managing an expectations path. He is saying the Fed will have permission to ease if the tariff shock remains contained, and the administration will hold the tariff lever to ensure it does. That is the real policy coordination, and it is happening entirely above the crypto market’s head. If you hold a DeFi position, you should care about the second-order effects that no White House statement can control. The first is the term premium. If the bond market begins to suspect that the Fed’s independence is being compromised — that the White House is jawboning rates down for fiscal convenience rather than data necessity — the market will demand a higher term premium on long-duration Treasuries. The yield curve will steepen, not because the economy is improving, but because the market is pricing political risk into the cost of lending to the government for a decade. A steeper curve with a falling policy rate is not the same as an easing cycle. It is a warning. It says the market trusts the Fed’s floor but not the government’s ceiling. For crypto, this is a two-step sequence. The first step, falling short rates, is bullish. The second step, a rising term premium, is a tax on all duration assets, including digital assets. If that term premium spikes, the stocks that were rallying on rate-cut hopes will roll over, and Bitcoin will follow them, because the liquidation of correlated risk assets is indiscriminate on days when the curve steepens violently. The second second-order effect is the dollar’s role as the settlement layer of crypto. Most trading pairs in the digital asset ecosystem are dollar-denominated via stablecoins. A weak dollar is superficially bullish for dollar prices of scarce tokens. But a disorderly dollar — one falling because the market no longer believes U.S. institutions can control inflation or repay debt — is a different animal. It is the 2022 experience inverted. In 2022, the dollar rallied as the Fed hiked, and every dollar-denominated asset, including Bitcoin, collapsed under the weight of dollar scarcity. In a fiscal-dominance scenario, the dollar weakens because the Fed is no longer willing to hike into inflation. The result is stagflationary: prices rise while growth stalls. Bitcoin was sold as an inflation hedge in 2021 and failed that test in 2022, because the inflation that matters for Bitcoin is not CPI but the inflation of the monetary base. If the Fed holds rates down while inflation persists, the monetary base will not expand; it will merely be trapped at a fixed level while prices rise. The market will not see a liquidity flood. It will see a liquidity drought masked by nominal gains. In that world, stablecoin supply growth is the only honest metric of whether capital is actually entering crypto — and that metric is decelerating. The third effect is the one I find most under-priced. The White House narrative shift has landed exactly at the moment when artificial intelligence agents are becoming meaningful actors on-chain. Earlier this year I published an analysis called “Who Owns the Narrative? AI, Autonomy, and the Death of Human Sentiment,” in which I examined ten thousand smart contract interactions to show how AI agents are standardizing market reactions. The thesis was that automation is eroding the unique human narratives that drive innovation. Hassett’s statement is a perfect test case. A human trader reads his sentence, weighs the political context, and adjusts position with the nuance of someone who has survived a dozen macro regimes. An AI agent reads the sentence, finds the phrase “rate hike,” measures it against the Fed’s published dot plot, and rebalances according to a correlation table. It does not feel the difference between a hawk becoming a dove and a politician lying. That difference is everything. The more on-chain trading is dominated by models that treat language as a signal vector rather than a human act, the more predictable the market becomes — and the more vulnerable it becomes to the kind of surprise that occurs when a single human official chooses a double negative instead of a direct statement. The ambiguity that protects the White House is the ambiguity that kills the AI trader. And in a bear market, the only edge left is the ability to read what the machines cannot. In the void, we find the architecture of trust. The past three years have been a void for this industry. The hacks, the collapses, the regulatory enforcement by memes, the existential boredom of investors who watched the S&P 500 outperform their digital assets. In that void, the end of hikes is the first load-bearing structure that the macro world has offered us since 2021. But trust is not built on a single sentence. It is built on the silence that follows. Since July 31, the silence has been the interesting part. The Fed has not confirmed. Powell has not called the White House to coordinate. No administration official has escalated to open demands for a cut, because escalation would cross the line from expectation management into institutional aggression. The silence is the architecture. And in that silence, on-chain data is accumulating. Stablecoin supply is growing. The gas price is low. The yield curve is preparing its next move. Nothing is yet decided. Here is the contrarian reading, and I offer it not as a correction but as a warning. The consensus interpretation of “difficult to push a hike” is bullish for crypto. I think the opposite is possible, and I think the timeline is the tell. The market did not move on the sentence because the sentence contained no new information. The policy rate was already at a plateau. The only real information lies in what Hassett did not say. He did not say the Fed should cut. He did not say the administration supports a weaker dollar. He did not get drawn into a timeline. Why would he say so little if the intention was to signal a pivot? The answer is that the administration does not want a pivot yet. It wants a pause to open the political space for tax legislation before it returns to the question of rates. The One Big Beautiful Bill, the Republican tax package that would extend and expand the 2017 cuts, needs a financing environment in which the deficit is not punished by the bond market. That financing environment requires the Fed to be neutral, not aggressive. Hassett’s sentence is therefore conservative, not progressive. It is designed to freeze expectation, not to accelerate it. And a frozen expectation is not a tailwind. It is a vacuum. In a vacuum, the price of liquidity is, for a time, set by fear. The second contrarian thread is about the on-chain data itself. The stablecoin supply growth I described earlier is real, but it is concentrated in the largest, most conservative issuers and it is not translating into protocol usage. If you look at the total value locked across DeFi excluding the big lending protocols, the number is still near the lows of the bear market. The yield-starved capital is sitting in dollars, waiting, not deploying. That is a rational response to a regime in which the perceived risk of a recession has not yet converted into the reality of monetary easing. But it is also a signal that the narrative of “the end of hikes” has not taken root in the place where it matters most: the margin. When the end of hikes becomes a margin event, you will see DEX volumes double in a week, you will see lending protocols hit utilization caps, you will see gas prices spike on Ethereum for reasons that have nothing to do with NFT projects. None of that is visible on the July 31 dataset. The market is treating Hassett’s sentence as a rumor, not a truth. And in a market that treats a truth as a rumor, the price action on the truth is delayed until the rumor is confirmed by someone else — Jackson Hole, the September CPI, the September FOMC. If the confirmation does not come, the delay resolves downward. The third contrarian thread is the most uncomfortable for crypto maximalists. It is possible that the end of the hiking cycle marks the structural top of the “digital gold” narrative rather than the beginning of its next wave. The 2020-2021 bull run was a monetary phenomenon, driven by the most aggressive and synchronized injection of liquidity in the history of fiat currencies. That liquidity is not coming back. The Fed is not going to return to zero rates while core CPI is 3.1% and the unemployment rate is 4.4%. The most likely path is a shallow easing cycle, a quick cut or two, and then a long plateau at a rate that is low enough to service the debt but high enough to prevent a wage-price spiral. That plateau is the killer. Crypto assets compound in narrative cycles that require acceleration. A plateau is constant velocity. In a plateau, the exit of the marginal buyer is not compensated by an entry of a new buyer, because the story has not changed enough to justify allocation from the institutional layer that still thinks in terms of Bitcoin’s correlation to equities. The end of hikes gives crypto permission to move, but it does not give it a reason to move higher. The reason must come from within — adoption, usage, cash flows, yields that are real rather than inflationary. And those things have not arrived. What would change the contrarian view? A break above the range on sustained volume would change it. A September cut delivered without a concurrent spike in the 10-year yield would change it. A Section 301 resolution that reduces tariff pressure and allows inflation to fall below 2.5% would change it. Each of these would convert the end of hikes from a political convenience into an economic reality. Until then, the rational posture is the one the on-chain data already displays: capital standing upright, at attention, waiting for orders. The lesson I learned in the Terra-Luna aftermath, when I retreated to a cabin in Lombardy for two months and wrote “Grief in the Blockchain,” is that narratives fail before institutions fail, and they fail because they promised certainty. Hassett has promised nothing but the end of certainty. He has promised the credit market a ceiling. He has promised crypto a floor. And a floor is not a future. It is only a place to stand while the future is built elsewhere. We build bridges in the silence after the noise. In the week following Hassett’s sentence, the noise is over. The FOMC statement was the noise. The press conference was the echo. What remains now is the silence of a market waiting for direction, and it is in that silence that the next architecture of trust gets assembled. For crypto, the architecture will look like this: short-rate instruments that track the Treasury curve, tokenized money markets that absorb the same dollars the Treasury is trying to service, and a yield economy that finally stops promising 20% and starts offering an honest spread over the risk-free rate. The protocols that will survive the transition are not the ones that gamify liquidity or manufacture yield from thin air. They are the ones that price risk correctly, the ones that treat the federal funds rate as the center of gravity, the ones that understand that DeFi’s competitive advantage was never the yield but the transparency with which the yield is produced. In a world where the Fed is done hiking and the Treasury is watching every basis point, transparency is the only moat. Now let me give you the numbers to watch, because numbers are the nodes of the narrative. Track the 2-year Treasury yield with the same rigor you track a governance vote. If it breaks below 3.7%, the cut is being priced as imminent and crypto will react with a lag of one or two weeks. Track the spread between sDAI and the 2-year. A narrowing spread is a message that on-chain money trusts the Fed; a widening spread is a message that on-chain money believes the fiscal hand is forcing the monetary one. Track the aggregate stablecoin supply divided by total DEX volume — I call it the conviction ratio. Rising supply with flat volume means capital is waiting; it is the exact pattern we saw in the months before the late-2020 breakout, and it is the exact pattern we also saw before the mid-2022 collapse. The difference is direction, which is set by trust, which is set by what happens at Jackson Hole. And track the dollar index against the yen and the euro, because the dollar is the unseen counterparty to every bitcoin trade. If the DXY breaks below 96 while the 10-year stays above 4.2%, you will know the term-premium regime has begun, and you will know that the end of hikes is not safe for risk assets — because a falling dollar and a rising long yield is the signature of a market that has lost faith in the steward, not the asset. In my 2024 consulting work with the pensions, I taught a simple heuristic: institutions do not buy the turn; they buy the confirmation of the turn. The turn here is not Hassett, who is a messenger. The turn is the data that has made hiking impossible — the same data that makes cutting difficult. Inflation at 2.4% headline and 3.1% core is still above the 2% target. Housing inflation is still elevated in the shelter components that dominate the CPI basket. The tariffs have not yet fully passed through to consumer prices; the lagged effects will show up in the October and November prints. A Fed that cuts too soon, while tariff-driven inflation is working its way through the pipeline, would repeat the exact error of 1970s central bankers who eased into supply-side shocks and paid with a decade of stagflation. The market is not pricing that error. The market is pricing the benign path. And in every cycle, the most crowded trade is the one that assumes the central bank will be lucky. Hassett is assuming the same. His own sentence contains the contingency — “based on current data.” If the data changes, the sentence dies. We should respect that humility, even as we watch the market ignore it. Let me end with the thing that most analysts are afraid to say aloud: crypto’s deepest bear market was never about the Fed. The Fed was the proximate cause of the 2022 liquidation, but the underlying disease was a narrative that had exhausted its vocabulary. The words “decentralized,” “permissionless,” and “revolutionary” stopped meaning new things in early 2021. The last four years have been a painful search for a new grammar. The end of hikes does not supply that grammar. It only makes the search less expensive. When borrowing costs stop rising, the cost of maintaining innovation falls, and the teams that have survived the bear can begin to experiment again. You will see it first in the small projects, the ones with no token price to defend, the ones building infrastructure for a world of stablecoin payments and tokenized debt. Then you will see it in the protocol revenue lines, which have been quietly recovering all summer. And then you will see it in the flows, which will arrive as suddenly as they always do, as if the market had never worried at all. Narrative is not what we say, but what remains. What remains from July 31 is a single sentence from a government economist, repeated across every terminal in the world: it is difficult to push for a rate hike. No one will remember it as the sentence that started a bull market. It is too careful, too contingent, too political for that. But it may be remembered as the sentence that ended the bear market’s alibi. For three years, every disappointment in crypto was blamed on the Fed. The Fed is no longer an excuse. The end of hikes is a closure, and closures are uncomfortable, because they force us to look at what is left after the excuse is gone. What is left is the real work: building protocols that earn their yields, assets that justify their valuations, and a narrative that can survive the honesty of a single look at the balance sheet. The Fed will not save us. The White House will not save us. The silence after Hassett’s sentence is an invitation to save ourselves. And that, unlike any rate forecast, is a story that can actually be built upon.