(End of the American Dream)—It would be difficult to overstate the seriousness of the crisis that we are facing. Just about every single industry in the United States is extremely dependent on imports from China, and now trade with China is essentially coming to a standstill. I wish that I was exaggerating, but I am not. According to the World Trade Organization, trade between the United States and China could decline by as much as 80 percent…
The World Trade Organization has warned that goods traded between the US and China could decrease by as much as 80%, backing US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s description of the current situation as essentially a trade embargo.
Unless something changes, this is going to be the biggest shock to our economy in decades.
At the moment, our stores are filled with products that are manufactured in factories in China.
But now many of those factories have become eerily quiet…
“I know several factories that have told half of their employees to go home for a few weeks and stopped most of their production,” said Cameron Johnson, Shanghai-based senior partner at consulting firm Tidalwave Solutions. He said factories making toys, sporting goods and low-cost dollar store-type goods are the most affected right now.
“While not large-scale yet, it is happening in the key [export] hubs of Yiwu and Dongguan and there is concern that it will grow,” Johnson said. “There is a hope that tariffs will be lowered so orders can resume, but in the meantime companies are furloughing employees and idling some production.”
We are also witnessing an unprecedented decline in cargo shipments from China to the United States.
Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka is telling us that “essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers have ceased”…
President Donald Trump’s trade war policies are expected to bring about a 35% decline in cargo arriving at the Port of Los Angeles by next week as “essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers have ceased,” according to Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka.
The good news is that major retailers still have Chinese-made goods that they previously purchased to sell to us.
But as they work through their existing inventory levels, pretty soon we are going to start seeing empty shelves.
In fact, the chief economic advisor to President Trump during his first term is openly warning that we could start experiencing significant shortages in late May…
American consumers are just weeks away from feeling the effects of President Donald Trump’s tariffs at the cash register, Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic advisor during his first term, said.
In a CBS interview, Cohn forecast that the consequences of newly imposed tariffs on China will start rippling through the US economy by late May.
“The cycle from a good being sold in China, loaded on a vessel, sailed across the ocean, unloaded in the United States, put in a factory, and distributed to a shelf is about eight weeks in the United States,” he told “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management, is also pointing to next month as the time when we will begin seeing “empty shelves in US stores” and “Covid-like shortages for consumers”…
The economic impact of the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration will soon become apparent to everyday Americans and lead to a recession this summer, according to Apollo Global Management.
Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo, laid out a timeline in a presentation for clients that showed when the impact of tariffs announced by President Donald Trump could hit the U.S. economy. Based on the transport time required for goods from China, U.S. consumers could start to notice trade-related shortages in their local stores next month, according to the presentation.
“The consequence will be empty shelves in US stores in a few weeks and Covid-like shortages for consumers and for firms using Chinese products as intermediate goods,” Slok wrote in a note to clients Friday.
In his note, Slok went on to warn that unless something changes it is likely that we will soon see substantial layoffs in the trucking and retail industries.
Approximately 80 percent of our toys are normally made in China, and so that is one industry that will be absolutely monkey-hammered if things do not change…
The tariffs are expected to hit small businesses especially hard. Toy retailers, for example, are already struggling with a 145% tariff on goods they normally order for the holiday season. Many are either scaling back orders or facing potential closures, Cohn said.
Last week, logistics experts and shipping industry insiders echoed similar concerns, telling Business Insider they expect major disruptions to the prices and availability of goods in the coming weeks.
Four even warned that unchecked supply-chain stress could trigger higher domestic unemployment, global market instability, and rising geopolitical tensions.
Whatever you think that you are going to need for the second half of this year, I would get it now while you still can.
The president of a company that supplies major retailers with holiday decorations is concerned that his business could be ruined if a trade deal is not worked out soon…
“The clock is absolutely ticking,” said Jim Gerson, president of The Gersons Companies, an 84-year-old supplier of holiday decorations and candles to major US retailers. The company, based in Olathe, Kansas, sources more than half its products from China and currently has about 250 containers waiting to be shipped.
“We have to get this worked out,” said Gerson, who’s part of the third generation from his family to run the company, which generates roughly $100 million in sales a year. “And hopefully very soon.”
He is right.
The clock is most certainly ticking, and more damage is being done with each passing day.
Unfortunately, it does not appear that a trade deal with China is anywhere on the horizon at this stage.
In fact, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is insisting that it is up to China to make the next move…
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday put the responsibility for reaching a trade agreement on China.
“I believe that it’s up to China to de-escalate, because they sell five times more to us than we sell to them, and so these 120%, 145% tariffs are unsustainable,” Bessent said during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
A lot of products that are made in China have already disappeared from Amazon.
So let me offer a piece of advice.
I would recommend making a list of products that you normally purchase and products that you think that you will need in the months ahead.
If any of those products are made in China, I would purchase them immediately.
I do not think that we are going to see a trade deal with China any time soon, and that means that we are about to move into unprecedented territory.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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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.