US inflation has come down from its 2022 peak far more slowly than markets expected, and in recent months it has repeatedly stalled above 3%. Much of the debate centers on whether the Federal Reserve should raise rates again. The more important question is why the mechanism that held US prices down for three decades has stopped working.
Three forces are pushing at once: government borrowing has raised the floor under interest rates, tariffs keep cheap goods out, and labor costs keep climbing because of demographics. The three feed on each other, and the result shows up every month in the price data that frustrates policymakers.
The government is the biggest borrower in the bond market
Federal debt has passed $40 trillion, and annual interest payments alone are approaching $1 trillion. As the largest borrower in the bond market, the government keeps draining funds from it, pushing up the floor under interest rates. Corporate financing costs rise in turn, and those costs eventually reach the prices of goods and services.
At the same time, capital spending guidance from the big cloud providers has been raised from $380 billion to more than $710 billion. That money does not need congressional approval; companies borrow it themselves. The debt chain is more striking still: US media have reported that behind nine US tech giants sit nearly $3 trillion in hidden debt — borrowing to buy computing power, renting that power out, then pledging the leases to borrow more. The more expensive the asset, the more collateral, the longer the chain; if the price of any one link falls, the whole chain has to be repriced.
Tariffs and wages: costs go around in a circle and land on the shelf
Tariffs work bluntly: they shut out cheap goods, so companies pass higher costs on to the shelf. Wages then try to catch up with prices, prices catch up with wages, and after one turn the most expensive link is always the consumer who pays last.
Labor costs are the stickiest part of inflation. In manufacturing, comprehensive hourly labor costs run $6 to $8 in China, $35 to $40 in the US and the equivalent of $55 to $65 in Germany. A wage gap of three to six times is not something policy can erase; it is a structural gap poured over decades by education, demographics and exchange rates. Wages do not come back down once they rise, and with too few workers at ever higher cost, service prices can only climb year after year.
The old bargain is failing: once technology catches up, price is the only dimension left
The bargain underpinning the past three decades was this: the US supplied technology and brands and took monopoly profits, China supplied labor and resources and took the hard-earned money; the US got cheap goods and low inflation, China got orders and jobs, and dollars flowed back to buy US Treasuries. US fiscal deficits matched Chinese export orders; Chinese overcapacity matched two decades of US low-inflation gains.
The cycle ran for 30 years on a premise few wanted to name: the dollar is the world’s currency. The US prints, the world holds; the US borrows, the world buys. So its deficits could widen year after year without blowing up immediately, and it could export part of its inflation — until others no longer wanted to hold it.
The bargain had another implicit premise: that China would never catch up. That premise is failing. Once technology is matched, monopoly profit goes to zero in an instant. The US model of high profits, high welfare and high pay rested on “I have what you don’t.” When you have it too, price is the only dimension left: whoever’s cost is lower. The moment technology is matched is the moment of the price floor.
Solar power is the ready example: about 80% of global production capacity is in China, module prices have fallen by two-thirds in three years, and in the first half of 2026 the five largest makers together lost more than 14.8 billion yuan — world-leading technology, and the prize is not windfall profit but a harsher price war. Chips look the same: in the first seven months of 2026, integrated circuit exports reached $216 billion, up 99.5% year on year, exceeding a full previous year in seven months.
A measured judgment
US inflation is not stuck purely because of monetary policy. It is the combined result of fiscal expansion, tariff barriers, the structure of the labor force and a global division of labor all changing at once. Rate hikes can suppress demand, but they cannot slow the government’s borrowing or close a wage gap of three to six times.
The real question is this: when “I have what you don’t” no longer holds, what does the US plan to put in place of the low-inflation mechanism that ran for 30 years? That question matters more than the outcome of the next rate meeting.
Source: Zhihu https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2089896770952237320?utm_medium=openapi_platform&utm_source=b38f6831b176
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