(The Economic Collapse Blog)—When are we going to wake up and admit that our system is failing? If close to half of our young adults find themselves needing to live with their parents, we have a major crisis on our hands. Yes, there are some young people that are simply lazy and don’t want to work hard enough. I definitely understand that. But most young adults in America today don’t actually want to live with their parents.
Given the opportunity, they would love to have their own homes. Unfortunately, home prices have risen to absolutely absurd levels and housing in America is now more unaffordable than it has ever been before.
I feel so badly for the millions upon millions of young people that are struggling so much right now.
We encourage them to pile up giant mountains of student loan debt without ever considering the consequences, and then once they get out into the real world they quickly discover that the cost of living has become extremely suffocating.
As a result, vast numbers of young adults are finding that it is necessary to move back in with their parents…
Nearly half of all young adults are living with their parents — and they’re not ashamed to say it.
Moving out and living on your own is often seen as a marker of adulthood. But dealt an onerous set of cards — including pandemic lockdowns, decades-high inflation, soaring student debt levels and a shaky job market — young people today are increasingly staying put. What’s more, it’s no longer seen as a sign of individual failure.
Needless to say, this is not a good thing for our society.
The last time that such a high percentage of young adults were living with their parents was during the aftermath of the Great Depression…
These days, about 23 million, or 45%, of all Americans ages 18 to 29 are living with family, roughly the same level as the 1940s, a time when women were more likely to remain at home until marriage and men too were lingering on family farms in the aftermath of the Great Depression.
So why is this happening? One of the primary reasons why this is happening is because high interest rates have pushed housing costs to insane levels.
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This week, the average rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage reached 7.19 percent…
US mortgage rates remained flat this week, hovering over 7%, where they’ve been for six consecutive weeks as inflation pressures persist.
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 7.19% in the week ending September 21, a tick up from 7.18% the week before, according to data from Freddie Mac released Thursday. A year ago, the 30-year fixed-rate was 6.29%.
“Mortgage rates continue to linger above 7% as the Federal Reserve paused their interest rate hikes,” Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, said. “Given these high rates, housing demand is cooling off and now homebuilders are feeling the effect,” he said. “Builder sentiment declined for the first time in several months and construction levels have dipped to a three-year low, which could have an impact on the already low housing supply,” Khater added.
And this isn’t even going to be the peak.
In fact, NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun is warning that “in the short run, it’s possible that mortgage rates may go up to 8%.”
8 percent? Are you kidding me?
Even now, mortgage payments have escalated to absolutely crazy heights. Earlier this week, the following example was posted on Twitter by Amy Nixon…
This home sold in 2021 for $685,000
Buyer’s monthly payment? $3526
Buyer’s monthly payment today? $8402
“But wages went up!”
“But people have cash now!”
NO—THIS IS COMPLETE INSANITY
STOP PRETENDING IT IS NOT
She is right. This is nuts.
Only a very small percentage of the population can afford such monthly payments, and so millions of potential buyers are being sidelined. And millions of potential sellers are being sidelined as well, because most of them would need to purchase another home if the current home they are living in was sold.
So the vast majority of us are trapped in our homes right now. Most of us simply cannot afford to move because the mortgage payments would be way too high. Obviously, this is one of the main things that is greatly depressing home sales right now.
Sales of previously owned homes declined again in August. If you can believe it, they were actually down a whopping 15.3 percent from the already depressed level that we witnessed in August 2022. If you want to thank someone, thank the officials at the Federal Reserve, because they created this mess. Overall, Fannie Mae is projecting that this will be the worst year for home sales since 2011…
US home sales are headed for the biggest slowdown since 2011, according to Fannie Mae.
The government-sponsored mortgage finance company forecasted total home sales to slump to just 4.8 million this year, marking the slowest sales environment since 2011. That figure will only improve slightly in 2024, with total home sales expected to hit 4.9 million, Fannie Mae economists said.
If our young adults cannot afford to purchase homes, at least they can afford to rent places to live, right?
Wrong.
In recent years, rents have skyrocketed all over the country.
At this point, the national median asking rent in the U.S. is over $2,000 a month…
Landlords are continuing to ask near record-high rents amid a tight housing market, but tenants in some parts of the country are still finding deals, according to a new study from Redfin.
The asking rent in August was $2,052, up slightly (0.7%) from just a month earlier when the asking rent was $2,038.
When I was a young adult, I remember renting an apartment for $300 a month. And I thought that was expensive.
Unfortunately, I don’t see much help for our young people on the horizon. The Federal Reserve does not plan to cut interest rates any time soon. And it will be quite some time before housing prices decline enough to be considered “affordable”.
So if you are a parent, please be patient with any young adults that you currently have living at home. Factors outside of their control have made housing more unaffordable than it has ever been before, and economic conditions are going to continue to get harsher all around us.
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.