The policies of President Joe Biden’s administration are undermining the strength of the U.S. dollar and jeopardizing America’s worldwide influence, economists told the Daily Caller News Foundation.- Economists expressed concern regarding the possible consequences of Biden’s policies, highlighting the threat to the U.S. dollar’s global reserve currency status.
- “Losing reserve currency status … would mean 70 years of deficits flooding back to the U.S., all competing with existing dollars held domestically to buy goods and services,” Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni told the DCNF. “That’s a hyperinflation scenario. It also means we could no longer export inflation abroad, so we’d bear the full cost of future inflation ourselves.”
President Joe Biden’s administration’s policies are weakening the standing of the U.S. dollar and threatening America’s global influence, according to economists who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Economists told the DCNF about the potential repercussions of Biden’s policies, expressing serious concerns that the U.S. dollar’s global reserve currency status is at risk. The result could be hyperinflation, spending cuts and other severe consequences for the country; economists concurred that the actions taken by the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve have contributed to the depreciation of the U.S. dollar, but there was a divergence of opinion regarding the extent of the risk.
“The Biden administration has taken so many actions to dethrone King Dollar that it would be difficult to rank them all by their destructiveness,” Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni told the DCNF.
As the reserve currency, the U.S. dollar is involved in the majority of business on the planet. International trade typically takes place in dollars.
“Losing reserve currency status … would mean 70 years of deficits flooding back to the U.S., all competing with existing dollars held domestically to buy goods and services,” Antoni told the DCNF. “That’s a hyperinflation scenario. It also means we could no longer export inflation abroad, so we’d bear the full cost of future inflation ourselves.”
Economists particularly criticized the Biden administration’s sanctions against Russia as a punishment for invading Ukraine. The U.S. seized Russian central bank assets and participated in banning Russian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the global financial messaging system, in February 2022.
The U.S. and its allies have taken over $300 billion worth of foreign currency assets held by the Russian central bank, which had been frozen due to sanctions, according to Reuters. A substantial portion of the seized assets are now located at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, although they are still owned by Russia.
Confiscating Russia’s central bank dollar reserves was “the single biggest Biden mistake,” Peter St. Onge, an economist at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF. “It put dozens of countries on notice that if the U.S. doesn’t like your policy, we’ll crash your economy and seize your dollars. In other words, dollars now carry a unique risk.”
Further, removing Russian banks from SWIFT “signaled to countries not politically aligned with the United States that we are willing to use the dollar as a political weapon, which made them reluctant to hold U.S. dollars,” Dr. Thomas Hogan, senior research faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), told the DCNF.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen lauded the sanctions, stating they will be effective in preventing Russia from destroying Europe without hurting the U.S. “Our actions, taken in coordination with partners and allies, will degrade Russia’s ability to project power and threaten the peace and stability of Europe,” Yellen said at the time. “We are united in our efforts to hold Russia accountable for its further invasion of Ukraine while mitigating impacts to Americans and our partners.”
These sanctions against Russia have led countries to devise alternatives to the U.S. dollar, AIER economist Peter Earle told the DCNF.
China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Brazil began trading in the Chinese Yuan and the Russian ruble instead of the U.S. dollar in 2023, according to NPR.
“No country wants to suddenly be unable to engage in international trade if they have a dispute or fall into disfavor with Washington D.C.,” Earle explained.
Additionally, Russian state-backed media has reported that Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) will soon announce a gold-backed currency.
“A gold-backed currency represents a real threat to all fiat monies, including the dollar,” Antoni told the DCNF.
“The real source of our power is the dollar,” Peter Schiff, the chief economist and global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, told the DCNF. “If the dollar wasn’t the reserve currency, government spending would have to be slashed.”
Inflation is another reason the dollar’s value is weaker, with economists blaming Biden and the Federal Reserve’s policy. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), a broad measure of prices of everyday goods such as energy and food, increased 3.0% on an annual basis in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The Biden administration’s spending, borrowing, and printing of trillions of dollars gave us 40-year-high inflation,” Antoni told the DCNF. “Such devaluation of the dollar has shaken foreigners’ confidence in the currency’s stability over time.”
However, Hogan told the DCNF that “the strength of the U.S. dollar is really determined by monetary policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve … the Fed creates inflation.”
“I don’t think inflation is Biden’s fault,” Hogan added. “In terms of inflation, I blame it entirely on Fed officials, not on the Biden administration.”
Hogan also was more optimistic, stating, “Luckily for us, it’s still less bad than in many other countries, which has kept the international value of the dollar relatively stable. Although dollar dominance has declined in recent years, the magnitude is small. There is no other serious contender for widespread use in international exchange.”
“Even though I would like the United States to have a more stable currency (less inflation), a stronger economy (less regulation), and a more reliable government, we are still better on those margins than pretty much every other country in the world,” Hogan added. “Unless China or Russia suddenly gets free markets, strong property rights, and a stable currency, they do not present a serious threat to U.S. dollar dominance.”
Earle was also optimistic about the dollar’s future as the reserve currency. “Ejecting the dollar from the top spot as the global reserve currency is highly unlikely and would take decades,” he told the DCNF.
Antoni disagreed. “It’s difficult to overstate just how calamitous this would be and how quickly it could happen,” he said.
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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.