Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. – Ecclesiastes 5:10, NIV
In the past week, there’s been an enormous amount of virtual ink spilled on the banking crisis. I confess I’ve read dozens of articles and columns without a much clearer grasp of what’s happening than before I started. (Ironically, one of the best explanations can be found within the dry humor of “Awaken with JP.” Watch his hilarious “Banking Collapse Explained for Dummies.”)
Why these banks are failing is beyond both the scope of this column and my personal comprehension. Some have speculated it was focusing too much on “woke” investing rather than shareholder returns. On the other hand, it doesn’t look like the bankers have a much better grasp of finance than I do, based on some of the videos emerging. “Is it surprising that Signature Bank failed?” notes this Twitter post. “Their executive team spent millions of dollars to produce music videos & TV shows about themselves. Try not to cringe as you watch this.”
Whatever the reasons behind the crisis, literally billions of dollars have been wiped out. Supposedly even Prince Harry, Meghan Markle and Oprah got caught in the carnage. While those on the inside engaged in suspicious activities (selling stock and handing out bonuses), the vast majority of depositors were taken completely by surprise. The whole thing fell in about 48 hours.
And see, that’s what concerns me. How many other financial institutions may face similar disasters? How many other banks are just fine – until they’re not?
As of this writing – and in the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste – we learn Moody’s Investors Service downgraded its outlook for the U.S. banking system, that Biden is effectively nationalizing the deposit base of the entire U.S. financial system, that financial regulators are being asked to censor social media to prevent bank runs and that bank fears are going global. Some say the feds are using the bank meltdowns to kill off regional and local banks and consolidate power. Some claim – with justification – that this is an orchestrated situation designed to push America toward digital currency.
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So instead of writing a clever and witty summary of events (something I’ll reserve for more financially literate people), I’m writing this from the perspective of an ordinary housewife watching the problems with America’s financial system.
I’m seeing the cascading effects of high-level banking and government intervention combined with millions of terrified Americans who fear they’re going to lose their life savings and retirements. A banking crisis is frightening enough for economists and those in the know. Imagine how much worse it is for those NOT in the know – the ordinary people who have worked hard their entire lives and managed to maintain a modest financial cushion, who must now attempt to decipher the conflicting reports (“Everything’s fine!” “No, everything’s about to collapse!”), wade through the finger-pointing and blame game, and try to salvage whatever rainy-day cushion they had.
As an example, consider this heart-pounding Twitter thread of someone who had two companies, his personal savings and his mortgage with Silicon Valley Bank as he tries to save his finances.
Needless to say, rumors are flying thick and fast. On one side, our politicians are assuring us the economy is sound, banks are safe, and everything’s glorious. On the other side, the more paranoid types are warning this is the start of another Weimer Republic, and by golly, if you don’t already own a mountain of gold, you’re doomed. In all likelihood, the reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
But one thing is becoming crystal clear: There are big winners and big losers in this game. Spoiler alert, your average Joe Sixpack is not one of the winners.
Ironically, before Silicon Valley Bank was even on the national radar, I had ordered a book called “When Money Dies” by Adam Fergusson. First printed in 1975 and reprinted in 2010, it’s a well-researched history of the hyperinflation that took place 100 years ago in Germany. I only received it a couple days ago and have barely had a chance to crack it open.
But the Prologue was sobering enough. “The German people were the victims,” Fergusson writes. “The battle, as one who survived it explained, left them dazed and inflation-shocked. They did not understand how it had happened to them, and who the foe was who had defeated them.”
The story of the dramatic hyperinflation, continued the Prologue, “is one which the great authorities have sometimes seemed to lose touch with: the effect of inflation on people as individuals. … Disaster itself was devalued: in contemporary documents the word was used year after year to describe situations incalculably more serious than the time before.”
Fergusson concludes his Prologue by writing: “This is, I believe, a moral tale. It goes far to prove the revolutionary axiom that if you wish to destroy a nation you must first corrupt its currency. Thus must sound money be the first bastion of a society’s defense.”
Sound familiar?
Everything is happening so fast. By the time this column is published, who knows what new information may come to light, what other financial institutions may have collapsed, or what nefarious financial schemes may be orchestrated?
No one knows how this banking crisis will end. For us personally, we have our money spread out among three separate credit unions, and have for several years. At this point in the Biden economy, that seems like a wiser move than having all our eggs in one basket.
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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.
LOL, here comes the Great Big Reset! The greedy cornhole oligarchs are going to stomp their jackboots on everyone’s necks all at once, and when they all go to digital currency you can kiss your “retirement savings” good freakin’ bye. This giant machine is going to roll over humanity like an unsatiable giant MONSTER on steroids. All of the heartless, demonic ba$tards who caused this will roast in Hell for all Eternity.
Only to the rubes like you who don’t understand finance and follow the sheep.
You really should pipe down skipper, your ignorance is showing.
Or has it already collapsed?
Little Billy Crystal, Mikey Steele, Jorjito Bush, Stanley’s lazy son, sociopath Hillary Rodman, the lying NY Grey Lying Lady, their friends in the hood, et al, likely will not receive the justice that they richly deserve unfortunately.
“How did you go bankrupt?”
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Democrats love a slave. And they have convinced their base to support it as well.
A swift hard kick to the nads feels like childbirth. Or so I’m told.