Things weren’t supposed to move this quickly. Just hours after First Republic was dissected, two more major banks are in very serious trouble.
Are the dominoes going to start to fall more quickly than we were anticipating? After his bank gobbled up First Republic, Jamie Dimon told the world that “this part of the crisis is over”, and many in the corporate media believed him.
Unfortunately, Wall Street is not buying it.
On Tuesday, “fears around contagion in the regional banking sector” pushed stock prices significantly lower…
Stocks tumbled on Tuesday as traders’ fears around contagion in the regional banking sector returned ahead of the Federal Reserve’s rate decision.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 367.17 points, or 1.08%, to end at 33,684.53. The S&P 500 slid 1.16% and closed at 4,119.58. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.08%, ending the session at 12,080.51. The three major averages fell for a second consecutive session.
Many regional banks got hit really hard, and that includes two institutions that analysts have already been watching very closely…
Regional bank stocks fell sharply Tuesday as the fallout from the third major bank failure this year continued to put pressure on the sector.
Shares of PacWest fell nearly 28% on Tuesday and was on track for its fourth-straight negative session. The stock was halted for volatility multiple times.
The California-based bank was not the only regional lender under pressure. Shares of Western Alliance dropped 15%.
If they have to halt trading for a particular stock several times in a single day, that is a really bad sign.
Like First Republic, PacWest and Western Alliance both experienced tremendous deposit outflows as a result of the bank runs that happened during the first quarter…
PacWest and Western Alliance were also among the financial institutions, along with First Republic, that came under intense scrutiny following the March 10 and March 12 failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
Both lenders, like First Republic, lost a sizable amount of deposits during the first quarter as customers sought the perceived safety of larger banks or higher yields being offered by money market funds. PacWest, a lender based in Beverly Hills, Calif., lost 17% of its deposits and Phoenix-based Western Alliance lost 11%, while First Republic lost 41%.
Both institutions are now highly vulnerable, and as Dick Bove has aptly noted, those that have made massive amounts of money from recent bank failures are searching for their next victim…
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“People made a huge amount of money,” he said. “Those people who have driven SVB out of business, who benefitted from the Signature failure, who benefitted from the First Republic slow die, they made a lot of money.
“They are looking around to find another target.”
Of course PacWest and Western Alliance are not the only potential targets.
In fact, one news source is claiming that “half of America’s bank are potentially insolvent” at this point.
We really are in the early stages of the next major financial crisis.
And could it be possible that even some of our largest financial institutions are starting to show signs of trouble?
Earlier today, I was quite alarmed to learn that Morgan Stanley is planning to eliminate approximately 3,000 jobs…
Morgan Stanley is preparing a fresh round of job cuts amid a renewed focus on expenses as recession fears delay a rebound in dealmaking.
Senior managers are discussing plans to eliminate about 3,000 jobs from the global workforce by the end of this quarter, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That would amount to roughly 5% of staff excluding financial advisers and personnel supporting them within the wealth management division.
The health of the banking industry is of great concern for all of us, because the banks are the core of our economic system.
Right now, banks are starting to get really tight with their lending, and so that is going to mean less money is available for consumers and businesses. At this stage, even the Washington Post is talking about how tight lending standards have become…
Janna Rodriguez has big goals for her home-based child-care center. She wants to grow Innovative Daycare to serve more low-income families in Freeport, N.Y., but first, she needs a bank to loan her between $2 million and $4 million to help her move into a larger space and expand her hours.
So far, she keeps hearing “no.” Midsize banks near her in Long Island don’t want to take bets on the child-care industry, which has been hit hard by the pandemic, Rodriguez said. She’s felt lenders pull back even more since the March shock to the banking system. If she can’t expand, she’ll have to consider shutting the business down because otherwise, she just can’t see getting by.
And this isn’t just happening in the United States.
According to Zero Hedge, global lending standards haven’t been this tight since the collapse of Lehman Brothers…
A composite measure of DM banks’ lending standards shows they are the tightest since 2009. Tighter credit conditions will be an impediment to central banks’ preference to keep rates “higher for longer.”
The ECB’s bank lending survey was released this morning, with banks further tightening their credit standards.
This has pushed an aggregate measure of bank-loan credit standards to levels not seen since the Lehman crisis.
When banks get into trouble, they don’t have an appetite for taking risks.
Sadly, it is likely that banks will be very hesitant to make loans for the foreseeable future. So this will greatly depress economic activity.
In such an environment, it would be absolutely insane to raise interest rates, but that is what officials at the Fed have decided to do anyway. What this means is that more dominoes will fall, and the crisis that we have entered will get a whole lot worse.
Let’s keep a close eye on PacWest and Western Alliance. But they won’t be the only institutions that struggle for survival in the days ahead.
There is blood in the water, and the sharks are circling.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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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.