(The Economic Collapse Blog)—The rapidly growing chasm that exists between the ultra-wealthy and all the rest of us is not good for our society. In recent years, our leaders flooded the system with enormous mountains of money, and all of that money greatly enriched those at the very top of the economic food chain. Unfortunately, all of that money also created a tremendous amount of inflation which has been crushing the standard of living for millions upon millions of hard working Americans. We just witnessed the largest decline in real median household income since 2010, the child poverty rate in the U.S. has more than doubled, and this year homelessness is rising in our nation at the fastest pace ever recorded. So many Americans are deeply suffering right now, and we need to remember that they are real people with real emotions.
It can be absolutely soul crushing to work as hard as you possibly can but still find yourself falling farther and farther behind.
And when people come to the conclusion that they simply cannot take care of themselves no matter what they do, many of them will start to go completely nuts. Without a doubt, economic desperation is one of the factors that is fueling the massive crime wave that I have been documenting in my articles in recent months.
Theft is going to cost U.S. retailers over 100 billion dollars in 2023, and stores are being permanently shut down in our core urban areas at a staggering pace.
In fact, so many grocery stores have been shut down in Chicago that Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to create his own socialist grocery stores to replace them…
Chicago’s Democrat mayor wants to create city-run grocery stores to promote ‘equitable’ access to food after half of the city’s Walmart and Whole Foods stores closed.
Mayor Brandon Johnson announced a partnership with the Economic Security Project to open municipally-owned grocery stores in Chicago in a bid to tackle many of the city’s so-called ‘food deserts.’
That is crazy.
But that is how far the city of Chicago has fallen.
Sadly, crime is about to go to a whole new level in Chicago, because a new law that eliminates cash bail in the state of Illinois is about to go into effect…
An Illinois law eliminating cash bail state wide is set to go into effect on Monday, officials have revealed.
According to NBC 5 Chicago, this comes two months after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that the “Pretrial Fairness Act,” which is part of the larger “SAFE-T Act,” was constitutional.
If you currently live in the state of Illinois, you may want to start considering other options.
But it isn’t just Illinois that is out of control.
All over the country, millions of our young people have come to the conclusion that the system is rigged against them.
So they figure that if the system is fundamentally unfair, why should they try to abide by the rules?
Many of our young people are now openly lawless, and in such an environment literally no one is safe…
A female gas station cashier in Washington state had no time to react amid an onslaught of punches and kicks to the face and head during a violent robbery.
Leah Johnston was attacked by six suspects, some thought to be just teenagers, while working at Friendly Normandy Market in Normandy Park on September 15.
The gang piled cigarettes and candy into their arms and stripped the register of cash before escaping.
Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.
The cost of living is going to continue to rise faster than our paychecks, and that means that the level of desperation will continue to increase.
In Canada, food prices have already become so crazy that the government is actually threatening to take legal action against grocery stores…
The Canadian government is taking aim at grocery stores, warning them of “big consequences” if they fail to provide “relief for Canadians” by stabilizing food prices by October 9. This comes amid rising inflation in the country and as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party trails badly in the polls.
Speaking at the Liberals’ national caucus retreat in London, Ontario on Thursday, Trudeau said he expects “to hear from them [the largest grocery chains] by Thanksgiving on what their plan is to stabilize prices,” adding that “if their plan doesn’t provide real relief for the middle class and people working hard to join it, then we will take further action, and we are not ruling anything out, including tax measures.”
But the truth is that the grocery stores are not being particularly greedy.
It is our leaders that have created this inflation crisis, and it is not going to go away any time soon.
In fact, it is about to get even worse because the price of oil is starting to spike…
After languishing a multi-year lows until the end of June in the low/mid-70s range after Biden drained over 270 million barrels from the SPR to a near record low in hopes of pushing the price of gasoline lower and achieving short-term political goals…
… oil has since surged by more than $20, or 32% since the low of $71.57 on June 28, its fastest ascent since the start of 2022, a rally that was sparked by Saudi Arabia’s decision to voluntarily cut an additional 1 million bpd of production in addition to the reductions agreed by the OPEC+ group…
… thereby intentionally creating a production deficit of over 3 million barrels per day.
As such the price is likely to keep rising well into the 100s, as we first predicted two weeks ago, and as Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said today on BBG TV.
Virtually everything we buy has to be transported in some way, and so the price of oil factors into just about everything.
So it should deeply alarm all of us that the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the Los Angeles area has almost reached six dollars…
Southern California drivers are feeling the squeeze of high gas prices yet again.
On Monday morning, the price of a regular gallon of gas averaged about $5.92 in the Los Angeles area, according to AAA.
That’s a 5-cent increase from the day before and nearly 40 cents more than a week ago.
What we are witnessing now are things that we have been anticipating for a very long time.
We really are in the very early stages of a major economic meltdown.
As the U.S. economy crumbles all around us, millions of people are going to become very desperate, and very desperate people do very desperate things.
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.
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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.