Relationships between/within asset classes

Recent grad here who didn't take any econ classes in college, but did a bit of self study here and there. I've been having a lot of trouble figuring out how things like rates, currencies, inflation, gold, oil, etc. relate to each other (and usually this comes up when I'm reading the news/books). While I can understand isolated cases, like how the Fed can tackle inflation by adjusting rates or how currencies/trade balances interact with rate changes, I just can't seem to grasp things when they get more complex. In particular, I often can't figure out if a particular change is the cause or the effect of some other change, or if there's no clear-cut relationship to begin with (did rates rise because of inflation, or did rates cause inflation? is the currency down b/c of inflation, or did a weakened currency lead to inflation? etc.). Are there any practical frameworks I can use to think about these things? Books/primers? I know that in econ classes a lot of the scenarios are ceteris paribus, so often I'm not even sure if conjuring one of those supply/demand graphs in my mind is correct or not.