(The Economic Collapse Blog)—We did it Joe! It took a tremendous push down the stretch, but the U.S. national debt was able to hit the 34 trillion dollar mark before the end of 2023. At this moment I am just so overwhelmed that I don’t know who to thank first. Over the past few years, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chucky Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy and so many other hard working spenders have been instrumental in helping us reach this remarkable achievement. And we never would have gotten here without the relentless help of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post and all of the other mainstream news outlets that kept assuring the American people that it was okay to steal trillions of dollars from our children and our grandchildren.
Of course I am being quite facetious. The truth is that what we are doing to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal. We are literally committing national suicide, but each election cycle most of the same big spending politicians just keep winning over and over again.
Those on the other side would argue that it has been absolutely necessary to borrow and spend so much money. If we had not propped up the U.S. economy with giant mountains of borrowed money, it would have collapsed long ago.
In addition, spending so much money allows us to project military and economic power all over the planet. If we only spent what we brought in, America’s standing in the world would be greatly reduced.
Having the primary reserve currency of the world is an enormous source of power, but now that power is fading.
Nations all over the globe are starting to move away from using the U.S. dollar in international trade, and they are becoming a lot more hesitant to buy our debt.
You can only borrow and spend so much before the entire Ponzi scheme collapses, and at this moment we are more than 34 trillion dollars in debt…
US national debt has reached a record high – hitting $34 trillion for the first time in history.
Data published by the Treasury Department Tuesday showed that outstanding federal borrowing soared to $34.001 trillion on December 29, just weeks ahead of Congress deadlines for new federal funding plans.
The staggering figure, which is a major point of contention between Republicans and Democrats, is equal to $101,233 in federal debt for every person in America, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
So if there are four people living in your household, your share of the national debt is more than $400,000.
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And every day the debt gets even larger. As Wolf Richter has pointed out, the size of the national debt has increased by 2.5 trillion dollars in just the last seven months…
The total US national debt spiked by $1.0 trillion in 15 weeks since September 15, to $34.0 trillion, according to the Treasury Department’s figures this afternoon. In the seven months since the debt ceiling was lifted, the national debt spiked by $2.5 trillion.
These are huge gigantic numbers that are piling up as a result of the incredible hard-to-fathom daredevil reckless shake-your-head deficit spending by Congress.
Overall, the U.S. national debt has grown by $6.25 trillion since Joe Biden entered the White House.
It took the first 225 years of U.S. history for the U.S. national debt to reach the 6 trillion dollar mark, and now we have added more than 6 trillion dollars to the debt in less than 3 years.
This is what the endgame looks like.
We are in a debt spiral that is totally out of control, and there is no way that this story is going to end well.
And despite the fact that we are endlessly pumping colossal piles of cash into the economy, our economic conditions continue to deteriorate.
On Wednesday, we learned that U.S. job openings have fallen “to the lowest level in more than two years”…
U.S. job openings dropped in November to the lowest level in more than two years, the latest evidence that the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hike campaign is continuing to cool the labor market.
That is a sign that the economy is getting worse.
And more large companies continue to lay off workers. For example, Xerox just announced that it will be laying off 15 percent of its workforce…
Xerox on Wednesday announced it will cut 15% of its workforce as part of a plan to implement a new organizational structure and operating model.
Xerox, which offers digital printing and document management technologies, had about 20,500 employees as of Dec. 31, 2022, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Based on this figure, Wednesday’s layoffs will affect about 3,075 employees.
Shares of Xerox closed down more than 12% following the announcement Wednesday.
So what can we do to “get the economy going again”?
Well, we can follow the example of the federal government and borrow and spend even more money.
Of course much of the nation is already drowning in debt. According to one recent survey, only about half the country will be able to pay off their December credit card balances in full…
Only half of America’s credit card customers believe they can pay off their December balance in full, according to an industry index, signaling a low ebb in “credit card confidence” as the nation emerges from the holidays.
The LendingTree Credit Card Confidence Index, a monthly survey published since 2018 by the personal finance site, dipped to 51% in December, an all-time low.
In a nationally representative survey of 1,514 cardholders, only 51% voiced confidence that they could pay off their card balance this month. In November, the Confidence Index stood at 58%.
Our forefathers handed us the keys to the greatest economic machine in world history.
But that was never enough for us.
We always had to have more, and so we just kept borrowing and spending.
Now the endgame has arrived, and it is going to be excruciatingly painful.
U.S. consumers are drowning in record levels of debt, U.S. corporations are drowning in record levels of debt, state and local governments are drowning in record levels of debt, and the federal government is drowning in record levels of debt.
America’s empire of money was nice while it lasted, but now the jig is up and the collapse that is looming is truly going to be one for the history books.
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.
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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.