The latest inflation report reveals that inflation is slowing, but it remains at a 40-year high.
The stock market rose, as softer-than-expected inflation rate gave investors hope the Federal Reserve may not have to raise its target rate quite as fast. A 7.7-percent increase in prices over the last year shouldn’t make people hopeful. Many Americans can’t afford soaring living expenses, however, and the economy will worsen before there’s any relief.
Adding to this struggle are inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings, which are down 4 percent over the last year, and have been declining for nearly two years. This deflating of the American Dream is the result of big-government policies, creating too much money chasing too few goods.
Just the necessity of food is a struggle. Food prices at work and school are up 95 percent. Eggs are up 43 percent, and chicken, 15 percent. Gasoline to drive to the store is up nearly 18 percent and electricity, 14 percent, so even making meals at home can rock the budget.
To cope with less purchasing power, Americans are not only saving less, they’re also accruing credit card debt, to a record high of nearly $1 trillion. Even in states with comparatively low cost of living, like Texas, people with full-time jobs can’t make ends meet for their families and are showing up at food banks for help.
Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come.
The Fed’s meager strategy for fighting inflation hasn’t included aggressively cutting its $8.6 trillion balance sheet. The balance sheet is only about 3.8 percent less than its record high in April 2022, after more than doubling during the pandemic.
This overprinting of money affects many markets, as those dollars aren’t evenly distributed across the economy, resulting in distorted price signals. The Federal reserve adding assets to its balance sheet (by buying Treasury debt, agency debt, and mortgage-backed securities) kept interest rates artificially low. Those markets are starting to correct, as mortgage rates have risen to 20-year highs of around 7 percent.
The Fed created the current inflationary situation (too much money), which was fueled by Congress’s deficit spending, and exacerbated by Biden’s overregulation (too few goods and services).
Now, the false “boom” is busting. Hardworking families and entrepreneurs bear the brunt.
To combat the problem it helped create, the Fed is raising its target federal funds rate, which has grown at the fastest pace since Paul Volcker was Chairman in the early 1980s. Volcker understood that the Fed’s balance sheet mattered most, which seems to be overlooked by the Fed and many economists today.
The Fed’s hike of 75 basis points on November 2 brought the top of the target range to 4 percent, which was the fourth consecutive 75-basis-point hike, after rates were held at essentially zero for two years. The Fed signaled that it will slow target rate hikes to likely 50 basis points in December, pushing the top rate to 4.5 percent by the end of 2022. This would be the highest rate in 15 years.
The Fed’s attempt to correct elevated inflation comes too late to avert the economic consequences of keeping the target rate too low for too long. As a result, Americans are suffering from persistent inflation, higher interest rates, and a prolonged, deeper economic recession.
What should be done? We need pro-growth policies.
The executive branch should focus on cutting regulations. Congress should prioritize making the Trump-era tax cuts permanent, cutting the corporate tax rate, and passing spending limits to help balance the budget. The Fed, the source of so much money mischief, should adhere to a monetary rule that will cut its balance sheet as much as possible, hopefully down to nothing.
These pro-growth, liberty-oriented policies will unleash the economic potential of the productive private sector and get people back working again at well-paid jobs, while substantially reducing inflation.
Big-government policies must end before they send us further down the road to serfdom. Our newly elected officials have a responsibility to prioritize fighting inflation, and restoring the American Dream.
About the Author
Vance Ginn, Ph.D., is founder and president of Ginn Economic Consulting, LLC. He is chief economist at Pelican Institute for Public Policy and senior fellow at Young Americans for Liberty. He previously served as the associate director for economic policy of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, 2019-20.
Article cross-posted from AIER.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.