(The Epoch Times)—Many investors are warning of the risk of a debt crisis, but governments are ignoring all the signals.
In an inflationary crisis, the government should reduce expenditures to help curb price increases while also anticipating a significant increase in borrowing costs. However, in this crisis, the Biden administration is ignoring all the warning signs and continuing to borrow at a record pace.
Debt crises always happen when even the most conservative investors refuse to add to a sovereign bond portfolio that is loss-making to begin with. Central banks may decide to purchase those unwanted government bonds, but then the inflation problem worsens and the losses at the central bank accumulate.
The enormous problem created by the monetary and fiscal insanity of 2020 is difficult to solve. Central banks are already publishing losses in their assets, and those negative results must be covered by taxpayers.
Government bonds have been an atrocious investment in 2022 and continue to generate negative results for investors in 2023. Furthermore, sovereign debt is rising at a record pace, ignoring the wall of maturities that the global fixed-income world is facing in 2024 and 2025.
The U.S. national debt has soared by $550 billion in less than a month. Total debt was $31.4 trillion in July and soared to $33.5 trillion in less than four months. This happened while the 10-year Treasury yield increased from 3.7 percent to 4.6 percent. Imagine a government that massively increases debt and does so at a record speed when there is a $500 billion investment-grade maturity wall in 2025 and the government faces $7.6 trillion of maturities of public debt in the next 12 months, according to Goldman Sachs. At the same time, Goldman Sachs also noted that data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission show that U.S. Treasury net long positions in two-year and 10-year notes have fallen to the lowest level since October 2018. This is truly a dangerous scenario in the middle of geopolitical tensions reaching new highs.
The U.S. government is counting on rising global demand for U.S. dollars to offset the increased fiscal imbalances and on the Federal Reserve to change its monetary policy if needed. This is a dangerous bet when China, Saudi Arabia, and other nations’ Treasury holdings are dropping to multiyear lows. It is also extremely imprudent to believe that the world will absorb the United States’s fiscal imbalances at any cost in the middle of a global geopolitical conflict. Furthermore, it is reckless to believe that the Federal Reserve will buy all the Treasury bonds required when the central bank is already loss-making. Such a level of irresponsibility may put the U.S. dollar in danger in the long term.
The United States’s fiscal imbalances are enormous, but so are the deficit levels of many other developed nations, and the combination of rising rates, losses at the central bank, and impending giant maturity walls happens as well in the eurozone.
All of this is evidence of the monetary debasement process that started in 2009, but accelerated in 2020. Governments are destroying the purchasing power of their currencies to disguise their enormous debt and deficit levels, and inflation is eroding citizens’ savings and wages. In this environment, sovereign bonds never protect investors.
Governments do not want to pay for the risk they take and will absorb others’ wealth via negative real rates or price losses in the issued bonds. The inflationary spiral is likely to remain persistent, and the prospect of another round of quantitative easing may not offset the accumulated losses in bond portfolios and certainly will not modify the currency debasement scenario.
In a period like this, gold becomes the cheapest asset by far. It is inexpensive relative to its historical purchasing power and monetary qualities, but it is even more attractive relative to the fiat currencies whose monetary value is dissolved by massive printing. The current debt problem and the geopolitical risk tell us that gold is a safe bet in a volatile world.
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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.