The economic meltdown that is coming should not be a surprise to anyone. Throughout U.S. history, there have always been signs that a major downturn was coming, and that is precisely what we are witnessing right now. Tax revenues are way down, demand for trucking services is way down, demand for cardboard boxes is way down, the money supply is shrinking at the fastest pace in modern history, and the Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has already declined for 15 months in a row.
At this point, anyone that cannot see what is coming has got to be willingly blind. The following are 7 trends which indicate that economic disaster is approaching very rapidly…
#1 When economic activity slows down, less tax revenue comes in. Right now, federal government and state government tax revenues are declining precipitously…
US state and local governments just experienced the worst decline in income tax revenues ever recorded.
This was the second steepest year-over-year percentage decline in history, with only the GFC having a worse outcome.
Note that Federal tax receipts are also dropped again, now at recessionary levels and approaching -10% on a YoY basis.
#2 When the economy slows down, trucking companies see less demand for their services. So it is deeply alarming that truck freight volume and spending absolutely plummeted during the second quarter…
Truck freight volume and spending in the second quarter of 2023 declined by the highest levels since the early days of the pandemic, the latest U.S. Bank Freight Payment Index revealed. Spending by shippers dropped 10.9% compared to the second quarter of 2022 while shipment volume dropped 9%, according to a statement from the Minneapolis-based bank.
#3 Employment is supposed to be the “bright spot” for the economy, but the latest employment report shows that the U.S. actually lost 585,000 full-time jobs last month…
Well, one look at this month’s adjustment and it’s literally a shocker: you will not hear anyone from the Biden admin or associated economist cheerleaders mention this, but the BLS reported that in July the number of full-time jobs plunged by 585,000 to 134.274 million, the biggest monthly drop since record covid crash of 14.7 million jobs!
#4 U.S. employers have already announced more job cuts this year than they did in all of 2022, and the hits just keep on coming…
CVS Health said Monday it is cutting approximately 5,000 jobs to focus more on healthcare services for its customers.
The move, which is supposed to help the company save money, will affect workers primarily in corporate jobs, the Wall Street Journal reported.
#5 Thanks to rapidly rising interest rates, monthly costs for new homebuyers are almost 20 percent higher than they were a year ago. This is absolutely crushing the housing market…
The monthly cost for a potential homebuyer has surged nearly 20% compared with a year ago as prices remain elevated, according to new data.
During the four-week period ending July 30, the monthly mortgage payment for the typical U.S. homebuyer sat at $2,605, 19% higher than the same period a year earlier, according to Redfin.
#6 The fact that delinquency rates for commercial real estate mortgages are skyrocketing is yet another sign that we are in the early stages of the worst commercial real estate crisis in all of U.S. history…
The delinquency rate of commercial real estate mortgages on office properties that had been securitized into Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) spiked to 5.0% by loan balance in July, up from a delinquency rate of 2.8% in April, having now spiked by 2.2 percentage points in three months, by far the biggest three-month spike in the data going back to 2000, and by 3.4 percentage points so far this year, by far the biggest seven-month spike, according to Trepp, which tracks and analyzes CMBS.
#7 The share of the U.S. population that cannot even afford “a $400 emergency expense” just continues to go up…
“The share of U.S. adults who said they would cover a $400 emergency expense with cash or equivalents dropped by 2 percentage points from the previous quarter to 46%, highlighting how cash-strapped many Americans are despite the recent decrease in headline inflation,” according to the survey developed by Bloomberg and conducted by intelligence company Morning Consult.
But Joe Biden and his defenders continue to insist that everything is just fine.
In fact, Joy Behar is quite certain that “the economy is booming” right now…
Leftist Joy Behar — who reportedly earns $7 million annually as a co-host on “The View” — said on Friday’s program that “the economy is booming” and “people are having an easier time putting bread on the table” in a passionate defense of President Joe Biden.
For those that are making millions of dollars a year, I am sure that everything must seem great.
But for the rest of us, things are tough.
Meanwhile, our banks continue to experience really weird “technical glitches”. For example, in recent days many Wells Fargo customers have been greatly upset about money disappearing from their accounts…
On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, users complained about their disappearing funds. One bank customer said they saw the news about the problem right as they noticed their deposits weren’t in their account.
“Right before this popped up in the news I saw that my deposits weren’t in my account,” their tweet read. “I was trying to pay bills and none would go through. This is so unacceptable.”
The company responded in a statement to CNN that a “limited amount” of their customers are experiencing the disappearing deposits. They said most of them were “resolved” and that they would fix the problem soon.
This is another example which shows why it is wise to never keep all of your eggs in one basket.
Our financial institutions are far more vulnerable than most people realize, and the cyberattacks that we have seen so far are just a small preview of what is coming.
Unfortunately, most Americans don’t understand any of the things that I have discussed in this article.
Most Americans are simply trusting that our leaders have everything under control, and so they will be bitterly, bitterly disappointed when they finally realize the truth.
Sound off about this story on our Economic Collapse Substack.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.