(The Economic Collapse Blog)—19 months in a row! The Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has now fallen for 19 months in a row. When something happens for 19 consecutive months, that is definitely a trend. The economy is clearly in big trouble, and conditions are getting worse with each passing day. But the mainstream media continues to insist that the economy is doing just great.
They tell us that inflation is low, but if it was still measured the way that it was back in 1980, the official rate of inflation would be well into double digit territory. And they tell us that the unemployment rate is low, but if honest numbers were being used the official rate of unemployment would be about 25 percent right now. There are highly qualified people that can’t even get an interview even though they are sending out hundreds and hundreds of resumes. What are they doing wrong?
Of course the truth is that they aren’t doing anything wrong. The employment market is far tighter than we are being led to believe, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.
When a working age American is not working, the government puts that individual into one of two categories. Right now, there are only 6.5 million U.S. adults that are officially considered to be “unemployed”.
But another 99.9 million U.S. adults are considered to be “not in the labor force”. So they don’t count as being “unemployed”.
When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 106.4 million U.S. adults that do not have a job right now. At no point during the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 did that number even reach 90 million. So don’t let anyone convince you that unemployment is low.
The elite are trying to do their best to convince us that everything is just fine, but meanwhile the Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has now fallen for 19 months in a row…
A key measure of the direction of the U.S. economy fell for the 19th straight month and once again indicated that a recession is looming.
The leading economic index fell 0.8 percent in October, the Conference Board said Monday. The LEI is based on 10 indicators that tend to forecast the direction of the economy.
Economists had expected a milder decline of 0.8 percent.
The last time the index declined for 19 months in a row was during the Great Recession when it fell from the end of 2007 through 2009.
The last streak of this magnitude started in 2007. But we didn’t have a recession in 2007. And things still seemed relatively fine in early 2008 too.
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Of course then we got to the end of 2008 and everything fell to pieces. That is why they are called “leading” economic indicators.
They tell us what is coming.
And what is coming in our time is not going to be fun.
Needless to say, most of the population is not prepared at all for a major economic storm.
Survey after survey has shown that most of the U.S. population is currently living paycheck to paycheck…
The majority of U.S. adults are living paycheck to paycheck heading into this holiday season, a report shows.
LendingClub’s latest report shows that as of October, 60 percent of adults said they are living paycheck to paycheck. Around 40 percent of consumers consider themselves to be worse off now than in 2022.
Even higher earners are struggling to get by, with 42 percent of those making six figures also living check-to-check under President Joe Biden.
According to a separate CNBC survey, the number of adults struggling to save between checks is up from 58 percent in March.
As long as those paychecks keep coming in, they can keep scraping by from month to month.
But now layoffs are starting to surge again all over the nation.
Young Americans are in particularly dire straits.
Millions upon millions of young Americans have low paying jobs and are deeply struggling with student loan debt, and this is one of the reasons why the average age of a U.S. homebuyer just keeps going higher and higher…
The average American homebuyer is now 49-years-old – 18 years older than in 1981 – as inflation, college costs and house prices make it harder for young people to get a foot on the ladder.
Research by the National Association of Realtors has revealed that the median age of all homebuyers has steadily crept up over the past forty years.
The most shocking contrast is for first time buyers where the median age is now 35, up from 31 in 2013 and 29 in 1981.
The American Dream is now out of reach for most of the nation, and that is especially true among those that are under the age of 40.
But the mainstream media absolutely refuses to acknowledge the truth.
They just keep telling us that things look great for the U.S. economy in 2024 and beyond. The following comes from a Yahoo Finance article entitled “The election year economy looks good for Biden”…
The much-predicted recession still hasn’t arrived. Will it materialize in 2024, at the worst possible moment for President Joe Biden, as he’s trying to convince voters to give him a second term?
It’s not looking that way. As economists roll out their forecasts for 2024, the prevailing theme is moderation: slowing but still-positive economic growth, a declining rate of inflation, and continued low unemployment.
Seriously? Come on man. Do they actually expect us to consume that pablum?
We are already in an economic crisis right now, and things are going to get so much worse during the years ahead.
You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that everything is okay if you want. But nothing is going to change the fact that the “endgame” has arrived.
Decades of very foolish decisions have brought us to this stage, and now we are truly going to reap what we have sown.
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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.