(The Economic Collapse Blog)—A “perfect storm” is raging all around us, and our world is so close to plunging into a complete and utter state of chaos that even the mainstream media is talking about it. The past several years have been a time when multiple major wars have begun, pestilences have paralyzed the entire planet, the worst global food crisis in modern history has erupted, and we have been hit by a seemingly endless series of natural disasters. But there is a growing consensus that even more difficult times are ahead of us. During a roundtable discussion on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, CBS News correspondent Catherine Herridge actually confessed that she is concerned that “2024 may be the year of a black swan event”…
CBS News’ “Face the Nation” held a roundtable on Christmas Eve, affording various talking heads an opportunity to make predictions for 2024. While most of the predictions were relatively banal, one among them stood out, prompting critics to puzzle over its possible significance.
Network correspondent Catherine Herridge, the wife of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, suggested that “2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that’s very hard to predict.”
I agree with her, but I don’t think that it will be just one “black swan event” that we will be facing.
Specifically, Herridge gave several reasons for why she felt the need to issue such a “dark” prediction…
Herridge told the other CBS News panelists Sunday there were a number of concerns that factored into her “dark” prediction, including that “this sort of enduring heightened threat level that we’re facing, the wars in Israel, also Ukraine, and we’re so divided in this country in ways that we haven’t seen before. And I think that just creates fertile ground for our adversaries like North Korea and China and Iran.”
Hmmm…
It seems like I have heard all of this somewhere before.
I just can’t seem to put my finger on it…
Of course she is right on target.
So much is going to happen during the new year that is about to start.
CNN is getting in on the act too. The following comes from an article that they just posted entitled “How 2023 has been the ‘year of the brink’ and 2024 could be worse”…
It could have been immeasurably worse. But holding back from the brink in 2023 has simply deferred vast crises to 2024. The post-Covid world is exhausted, cash-strapped, but ultimately more fraught than for decades.
Overshadowing it all will be a flagging hyperpower, at best distracted with presidential elections, at worst tearing itself apart in voting disputes and political extremism.
The likelihood the United States will be occupied by its own traumas amplifies each risk. The geopolitical given of a US response will be absent, fuelling authoritarian ambition, or a radical upending of the global order. 2024 could make 2023 seem rational and sober.
Very well said.
When CNN starts publishing articles that sound like they could have been written by me, that is clearly a sign that time is very short.
Just like Herridge, the author of the CNN article is also deeply concerned about the current state of the conflict in Ukraine…
Having spent two weeks around the frontlines, it is clear Kyiv faces an existential crisis in the coming winter. It will not survive without Western help. It cannot admit to the scale of challenges it faces without being dubbed by some US Republicans a loser, unworthy of US funding.
It is true.
Ukraine will not survive without western assistance.
And even if funding is restored to previous levels, the Russians will continue to gain ground.
At some point the government in Ukraine is going to become extremely desperate, and that is when things will start to get very “interesting” over there.
Meanwhile, the war in the Middle East just continues to heat up. On Tuesday, the U.S. military conducted a series of strikes on Iranian-backed forces in Iraq…
At President Joe Biden’s direction, the U.S. military carried out the strikes in Iraq at 1:45 GMT, likely killing “a number of Kataib Hezbollah militants” and destroying multiple facilities used by the group, the U.S. military said.
“These strikes are intended to hold accountable those elements directly responsible for attacks on coalition forces in Iraq and Syria and degrade their ability to continue attacks. We will always protect our forces,” said General Michael Erik Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, in a statement.
A U.S. base in Iraq’s Erbil that houses U.S. forces came under attack from a one-way drone earlier on Monday, leading to the latest U.S. casualties.
Iranian-backed forces have already attacked U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria more than 100 times.
Whether the Biden administration is willing to publicly admit it or not, the truth is that the U.S. is already at war in the Middle East.
Could we soon be at war with China as well?
Chinese President Xi Jinping just issued quite an ominous statement about Taiwan…
President Xi Jinping vowed on Tuesday to resolutely prevent anyone from “splitting Taiwan from China in any way”, the official Xinhua news agency reported, a little more than two weeks before Taiwan elects a new leader.
China views democratically-governed Taiwan as its own territory, despite the strong objections of the government in Taipei, and has ramped up military and political pressure to assert its sovereignty claims.
The Chinese will not invade before the upcoming election in Taiwan.
And I don’t think that the Chinese will invade during the early months of 2024. But an invasion is most definitely coming.
For years, I have been urging my readers to watch Russia, China and Israel. Now a time of global conflict is upon us, and many believe that 2024 will be the year when we finally pass the point of no return.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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.