(Schiff)—The latest buzzword in the mainstream financial media is “soft landing.” Everybody seems convinced the Fed has beaten inflation, and that it has completely avoided pushing the economy into a recession. According to the mainstream narrative, we may see a bit of an economic slowdown in the months ahead, but a recession is pretty much off the table. In his podcast, Peter Schiff explains why a soft landing is impossible.
Wall Street is booming with the growing belief that the inflation war is over, and not only is the Federal Reserve finished hiking interest rates, but it will begin to cut them in 2024.
The markets are excited because their drug pusher is going to show up with more supply. They’ve been away from the drug for a while. The Fed has been hiking rates and that’s not what the markets want. But now the markets are convinced that exactly what they need is going to be supplied as early as next year.”
Another factor driving market optimism is the idea that the economy will avoid a recession and we will enjoy a “soft landing.” It’s a Goldilocks scenario that features rate cuts in the absence of any kind of major economic downturn.
This raises a question: Why would the Federal Reserve start cutting rates and loosening monetary policy absent a significant economic downturn?
Peter speculated that with a lot of economic data weakening, the markets anticipate that the Fed will proactively cut rates to preempt a recession and prevent a crash landing. The thinking is as soon as it sees the economy coming in for a landing, it’s going to cut rates to ensure that landing is soft.
Peter called this “wishful thinking” at best. In fact, he said he expects a hard landing no matter what the Federal Reserve does. But if the central bank doesn’t try to preemptively cut rates, it will be an even harder “hard landing.”
Peter said that it’s difficult to understand why people think the Fed can raise rates from 0 to over 5% and get away without plunging the economy into a recession.
Why would that be if you look at the recent experiences with the Fed having rates too low and then raising them? Go back to the late 1990s and the decline we had in the economy, the recession, the stock market in 2000-2001. Look at the experience in 2008. And look at what happened even before COVID in 2018 when the Fed tried to raise rates from a low level and had to abort it very quickly when the wheels started falling off the bus in the fourth quarter of that year.”
History makes it clear that the Federal Reserve has a hard time normalizing rates. In fact, the attempt to bring rates from around 1% to just over 5% in 2007 led to the greatest recession since the Great Depression.
So, why would anyone believe that the Fed can normalize rates now and not have a similar consequence? Because, after all, the rate hikes expose all of the malinvestments and the misallocation of resources that take place when rates are artificially low.”
When rates are pushed lower than they otherwise would be by artificial means, people act irrationally. The decisions seem rational, but they are based on misconceptions. This drives people to make economic calculations that are not supported by the fundamentals.
Absent monetary central planners, interest rates would naturally fall if people saved money and put off purchases. In that world, economic decisions would be supported by naturally low interest rates. But we don’t live in that world. Americans want to buy now and pay later. We don’t have an economy naturally disposed to low interest rates. That means when the central bank forces rates down, it creates all kinds of problems.
Unlike a situation where rates are low for legitimate economic reasons and where the investments based on those interest rates can be supported long-term, when they’re artificially low, they can’t be. So, all those mistakes are made because rates are too low.”
In the early 2000s, artificially low rates drove a lot of mistakes in the real estate market. When that period came to an end, everything collapsed. As the Fed tried to normalize rates, the markets came in and tried to correct all of the imbalances that built up over the years of artificially low rates.
If that rate hike produced the Great Recession, why would people think that this time we’re going to get away with not having a recession at all even though this time the Fed didn’t stop at one? It went all the way down to zero. And it left rates at zero for more than a decade. So, rates were lower for much longer than they were back then.”
Add quantitative easing on top of that — three rounds before COVID and the mother of all rounds after COVID. Today, on top of rate hikes, the central bank is shrinking its balance sheet and pulling liquidity out of the financial system. That didn’t happen in the period leading up to the ’08 financial crisis.
We had rates lower for longer. We had all that quantitative easing. Now the Fed has raised rates and it’s reversing with quantitative tightening. This is a much bigger shock to the system than what the Fed did in 2008. And we built up over the years that the Fed kept rates at zero far more malinvestment and misallocations. Much bigger mistakes were made for a much longer period of time during this period. So now, there’s a lot more that needs to be fixed. A lot more mistakes need to be corrected. Misallocations need to be undone. So we have to have, by definition, a much bigger recession now than the one we had then. If that was the Great Recession, this is the even greater recession because we have a lot more mistakes to fix, a lot more sins to atone for. “
Despite this, most people believe were are not going to have a recession at all.
It makes no sense that anybody would believe that!”
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.