Inflation is going down! Isn’t that wonderful? When many less educated Americans hear this news, they will think that prices are going down. But that is not true at all. In fact, prices are still going up. They are just going up at a slower rate than they were before. According to the federal government, the Consumer Price Index was only 3 percent higher in June 2023 than it was in June 2022. That sounds like pretty good news, but it is imperative to realize that the formula used for the Consumer Price Index has literally been changed dozens of times over the decades. If the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would still be well into the double digits.
So we should be thankful that prices have moderated a bit (for now), but anyone that believes that inflation is “under control” is just being delusional.
Month after month, the cost of living just keeps becoming more oppressive for average Americans. At this point, U.S. families are under so much financial stress that they are even “skimping on everyday items such as toothpaste and toilet paper”…
Americans are skimping on everyday items such as toothpaste and toilet paper in a troubling sign for the US economy and major manufactures, financial experts have warned.
Personal hygiene products have taken a hit – with units of toothpaste, laundry detergent and toilet paper sold down three to four percent in the year through June 24, according to data from NIQ, Bloomberg reported.
Americans are also opting for cheaper brands and budget stores to combat inflation, in a blow to manufacturing giants such as Procter & Gamble and a boost to the likes of Dollar General.
Surveys have shown that more than 60 percent of the population is living paycheck to paycheck, and the reality of the matter is that a lot of us are looking to cut back anywhere that we possibly can.
Sadly, that even includes school supplies. According to Zero Hedge, it is being projected that back-to-school spending will decline “for the first time in nine years”…
According to a Deloitte survey released on Wednesday, back-to-school (BTS) spending, the second-largest spending event for families after the holiday season, is anticipated to decline for the first time in nine years. The survey’s findings indicate that consumers are struggling amid the two-year inflation storm, raising concerns about the success of “Bidenomics.”
Inflation has been eroding our standard of living for decades, and now we are at a point where tens of millions of Americans are just barely scraping by from month to month.
Once upon a time, anyone with a middle class income could afford to buy or rent a decent home or apartment.
But now it takes more than a middle class income to even rent a “glorified dungeon” in New York City…
A tiny disused space which has been turned into a $2,300-a-month apartment has been dubbed as nothing more than a ‘glorified dungeon.’
Popular TikTok account NYC Sales & Rentals took to the video sharing platform to showcase the bizarre set-up.
It revealed how the unusual apartment in central Harlem could be found at the back of the lobby, hidden behind the laundry room.
When I see stuff like that, it makes me very angry.
I simply cannot understand how anyone can possibly believe that the cost of living is under control.
It isn’t.
And more inflation is coming. Now that the “debt ceiling crisis” is over, our politicians in Washington have added a trillion dollars to the national debt in just five weeks…
It looks like the Biden-McCarthy “Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023” will rival the Inflation Reduction Act (Green New Deal) in its Orwellian meaning and outcome. Just five weeks after the deal was hatched, the Treasury has issued over $1 trillion in new debt!
This is simply astounding. It took from our founding until 1980 to accrue the amount of debt that we have now added in just over five weeks. It is truly hard to overstate the magnitude and impact of this spending.
Pumping so much money into the economy in such a short period of time is highly inflationary.
If our “leaders” in Washington were serious about getting inflation under control, they would stop borrowing and spending so much money.
But they will never do that.
So it is up to the Federal Reserve to try to do something about inflation, and it appears that they are gearing up for yet another interest rate hike…
Despite the slowdown in inflation, policymakers are widely expected to approve another quarter-percentage point hike at the conclusion of their two-day meeting. An overwhelming percentage of traders – more than 92% – anticipate the Fed will lift interest rates again at the end of the month.
Reading that makes me want to tear my hair out.
U.S. home values have already fallen by more than 100 billion dollars as the housing bubble bursts, and the commercial real estate market is coming apart like a 20 dollar suit.
As a result, small and mid-size banks all over the country are experiencing great pain, and loan losses are rising at a very frightening pace…
The major U.S. banks are set to report the biggest jump in loan losses since the COVID-19 pandemic, as rising interest rates put mounting pressure on borrowers across the country.
There is no way in the world that the Federal Reserve should be thinking about raising interest rates even higher.
But they are going to do it anyway.
Sometimes I feel like I am banging my head into a brick wall.
No matter how much we may object, our “leaders” just keep making incredibly foolish decision after incredibly foolish decision.
And it isn’t just the economy. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions in all areas have literally brought us to the brink of national suicide.
So please don’t be fooled when the mainstream media tells you that inflation is “under control” and that the outlook for the economy is improving.
The truth is that our long-term problems continue to escalate, and everything that those in power do to “fix things” just makes matters even worse.
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.
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.