(Natural News)—For Wolf Richter, publisher of finance and econ site Wolf Street, the long-term treasury market is finally waking up from its delusion that the Fed is going to gradually cool inflation to its target of two percent.
It is also finally admitting it cannot normalize interest rates after having spent 18 months believing in the hype about a Fed pivot and rate cuts to something like zero percent that would be forced on the Fed by a steep recession, with lots of forever-quantitative easing (QE) to follow.
The latest retail report reflected high increases in retail sales that were in good part due to high increases in inflation. Richter called the occurrence a “bond bloodbath.”
“Today, it is the 30-year treasury yield that pierced the five percent line. It currently trades at 5.02 percent, the highest since August 2007,” Richter wrote in his October 18 article. “The 10-year yield jumped to 4.92 percent at the moment, the highest since July 2007, edging within easy reach of the magic five percent line.”
These long-term yields above five percent only indicate that a form of normalcy is gradually being forced upon the bond market by the resurgence of inflation, and by the belated realization that this inflation isn’t just going away on its own somehow. “This is a huge regime change after years of the Fed’s QE and interest rate repression, and all prior assumptions are out the window,” he further pointed out.
The Daily Doom‘s David Haggith agreed with Richter’s sentiments and commented: “Delusion ends hard when the denial breaks up, and the Fed’s financial demolition is accomplishing that destruction now. If it doesn’t, inflation will do the job for it.”
His forecasts include: as the Fed tightens into a steep recession, the slide into the second plunge since last year’s dip will be steep as it will not likely come until the Fed tightens hard enough and long enough to break the “Everything Bubble” – an expression referring to the correlated impact of monetary easing by the Fed on asset prices in most asset classes, such as equities, housing, bonds, many commodities and even exotic assets such as cryptocurrencies and special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs).
This will send the American economy rapidly into recession in an all-out panic because people who have been investing based on such enormous delusions panic when they finally realize that they’ve run out past the edge of a mighty high cliff, he said, adding that the Big Bond Bubble crash would be inevitable because of the Fed’s quantitative tightening and its raising of interest rates. The government’s massive addiction to endless and enormous deficits, requiring massive new bond issuances, could also contribute to the collapse, he further noted.
“This deficit-spending by the government has to be funded by piling enormous amounts of Treasury securities on the market that need to find buyers. Yield solves all demand problems by rising until demand emerges. And that’s in part what we’re seeing now.
All of this is happening as the Fed is unloading its balance sheet at a record pace, having already shed over $1 trillion in securities in a little over a year,” a separate Wolf Street feature indicated.
Losses in Treasury bonds far worse than mortgage losses in 2008
Meanwhile, banks are in shambles as losses in Treasury bonds were found to be far worse than mortgage losses in 2008.
According to Haggith, the losses become realized losses if banks actually have to sell the bonds in their reserves to fund any flow out of the bank, as we saw last spring. Now, Wall Street bond investors are reportedly worried about the burgeoning U.S. federal debt because the trend in deficits is a strongly established fact and the Fed faces potential policy pitfalls ahead as it wrestles with how to respond to investor angst about the U.S. government’s humongous $33.5 trillion government debt.
As the Fed considers postponing plans for another interest-rate increase, they might be waiting to see if the bond vigilantes are doing their work for it now and pricing bond yields up, whether the Fed raises rates or not.
“At this point, the Fed will merely be running to catch up to what the free market is already doing just so it can appear to still be in control,” Haggith further predicted. “The Fed cannot help the government finance those massive deficits without spraying new gasoline directly into the inflation inferno it has already fueled, and the government cannot seem to stop itself from runaway spending. Even if it does manage to stop itself, the Fed’s roll-off of more Treasuries that have to be refinanced will continue to worsen the picture for bonds. So, will the rising of inflation, a major fear factor now that it is starting [to be] seen by investors, be back on the move?”
What is unfortunate is that until now, the bond market still foolishly believed the Fed would cave in on the inflation fight and go back to QE and/or it foolishly believed that the Fed’s inflation fight would be easily won. “This week’s economic news shined a bright light on the fact that all of that was fantasy. Realization about the inflation fight that remains is repricing everything,” he said hoping that the realization finally wakes the market fully now. (Related: Alarming study: 60% of Americans are still living paycheck to paycheck amid soaring inflation and rising interest rates.)
Visit DebtCollapse.com to read related news on the collapsing state of the U.S. economy.
Sources for this article include:
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.