Fed’s Kashkari: Inflation Still Too High, Strong Investment Demand Pushes Rates Up

Kashkari's framing matters less for the inflation read than for the rate backdrop it implies: strong investment demand as a structural driver of higher rates sits awkwardly with any expectation of near-term easing. For crypto and RWA markets, that keeps the cost-of-capital channel — not sentiment — as the dominant variable, and it complicates the case for risk assets that rely on a falling-rate narrative. The open question is whether other Fed officials echo this investment-demand logic or treat it as a Kashkari-specific view.