One of the more difficult aspects of working in economic analysis is the problem of rampant disinformation that you have to dig through in order to get to the truth of any particular issue. In this regard, economics is very similar to politics. The propaganda is endless and debunking it sometimes feels like moving a mountain with a teaspoon.
Establishment media sources lie incessantly about our financial conditions, and when they are finally cornered and forced to admit how bad things are, they then lie about the causes. That said, I find that these lies are usually designed to do one of two things: Over-complicate the problem so that people give up thinking about it, or, distract from the problem so that people blame a scapegoat.
As for inflation, here is the bottom line:
Central Banks And The Fiat Flood
Rising prices are caused by two main drivers. The first is money creation, or too many dollars chasing too few goods. Central banks around the world have been FLOODING the system with fiat currency ever since the debt crisis of 2008 and the Federal Reserve within the US is the worst violator by far. We are talking about tens of trillions (or more) in money creation, all supposedly as a means to stall or prevent a deflationary crash.
By the time the pandemic lockdowns were initiated and the Fed dropped $8 trillion+ onto the economy through stimulus measures like covid checks and PPP loans, the total US money supply was already at destructive levels. The covid stimulus was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. So, if you want to know who is directly to blame for your daily expenses rising 30% or more in the span of three years, the first set of criminals are the central bankers.
Governments and certain corporate partners are also to blame, but the central banks are the root mechanism for all inflationary movements.
It’s my belief (according to the evidence) that central banks have deliberately triggered a stagflationary crisis with the intent to forcefully replace cash based economies with a new digital and cashless global economy. However, that’s a discussion for another article…
Shortages And Core Resources
The other primary cause of rising prices is shortages or disruptions in key resources including oil and energy. Keep in mind that the war in Ukraine has led to the west being cut off from large portions of the resource rich Russian market. And, the war in Gaza has led to groups in the Middle East like the Houthis denying a majority of cargo ships and oil tankers from traversing the Red Sea.
By themselves, each one of these events seems like a small threat to the global supply chain, but when they pile up together the effects become detrimental. For now, the biggest factor is rising energy prices because this is the key resource that allows all agriculture and manufacturing to function. Every time oil prices rise you’re going to see prices in everything else rise.
This is the exact reason why the Biden Administration continued to dump the US Strategic Oil Reserves on the market for the past couple years. This was their way of manipulating oil prices down in order to mitigate or hide the greater effects of inflation. Now that they’re being pressured to refill those reserves and start buying again (at a much higher price) global oil prices and US prices in particular are spiking again.
Media Disinformation And Crushing Food Costs
Food costs have risen by 30% or more depending on the product since the beginning of 2020, and even though CPI reports several months ago showed a “slowdown” in overall inflation, this does not mean prices are going to go down anytime soon. In fact, they will only keep rising with each passing year.
CPI is a tool for measuring the AVERAGE price increases of over 80,000 products and services across a wide spectrum. Many of these items are not necessities and so they dilute the actual inflation we are seeing in everyday expenditures. If we were to look at an average of only daily necessities like housing, energy, food, etc. then CPI would read far higher.
When the media touts a lower CPI print as a sign that the economy is improving, what they usually don’t mention is that the stat only represents how much higher prices are going to go. A lower CPI does not mean costs on the shelf are going to go down. Inflation is cumulative.
Meaning, that 30%+ increase in food that Americans have been dealing with – That’s not going away, it’s just not climbing as fast as it was. And, as we’ve seen in the past couple months, inflation has the ability to return just as quickly to add even more gasoline to the fire.
Not long ago I was reading through an article from CBS that claimed they could explain why there’s been no respite in food prices lately. In reality the entire piece was disinformation, blaming every possible scapegoat while ignoring the real causes.
Their main explanation is “Greedflation,” or the claim that companies are overcharging on food items. In other words, blame businesses, don’t blame the Federal Reserve and don’t blame the government. They’re “innocent” in all of this.
There is so far no concrete evidence to support the Greedflation theory. Every business has unique expenses, unique overhead, unique industrial costs, unique quality control and unique resource costs. One cookie company’s bottom line will be different from another cookie company’s bottom line. That said, there are universal costs that directly correlate to higher prices regardless of the company, and that includes energy, labor, and core commodities.
For those that track the markets it’s obvious that commodities are climbing. The Industrial Commodity Index continues to rise along with oil and gas prices. Every base resource that companies use to make products is increasing in value and thus it costs them more to manufacture. Agriculture in particular is heavily affected by oil prices as well as prices in fertilizer and farming equipment, not to mention higher costs in labor.
From 2020 to 2023 the total costs paid by farmers to raise crops and care for livestock increased by more than $100 billion, or 28%, to an all-time high of $460 billion in 2023. Funny how that number tracks very close to the 30% increase in overall food prices since 2020. The establishment media wants you to believe that high food prices are going to go away soon, and in order to trick you they need to convince you that the cause is something that can be “controlled” or “regulated”.
There is no indication that agricultural costs are going to stop increasing in the near future, so, that means each year food is going to cost you more than the year before. It might even cost you MUCH more than the year before.
In conclusion, this is why people need to start looking at food as an investment similar to the way they might look at their 401K or any retirement plan. If you want to mitigate costs in the future in terms of food you will need to purchase foods with a long shelf life now. If you think that inflation is a passing phase and that things will go back to the way they were before 2020 then you probably won’t take this concern seriously. But, consider this:
Well before 2020 I was warning regularly about an impending stagflation crisis. The food storage I bought in 2020 now costs at least 30%-50% more to buy in 2024. Meanwhile, some of the top economists in the country were denying such a thing would ever happen. When it did happen, they claimed it was “transitory.” This was also proven false. Now they claim food will drop after companies are forced through regulation to cut prices.
One survival food company, Prepper All-Naturals, has proactively dropped prices to allow Americans to stock up ahead of projected hikes in beef prices. Their 25-year shelf life steaks currently come at a 25% discount with promo code “invest25”. Whether government intervenes or the market continues to react to poor fiscal policies, it is quickly becoming a necessity to invest in food security as soon as possible.
Government enforced price controls have never actually proven effective in stopping inflation. Once you remove all profit incentives many businesses will close up shop. This causes the supply of goods to go down and prices then spike anyway due to shortages.
Do you want to bet your future on establishment economists being right for once, or, do you want to just store some food today in the knowledge that prices are only going exponentially higher?
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.