In the more than four decades since he co-founded Home Depot, 93-year-old Bernie Marcus has learned quite a bit about the economy and business in America, developing strong views about what works and what doesn’t along the way.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, the billionaire discussed those views, lamenting the current state of the U.S. economy and sharing his concerns for the future.
“I’m worried about capitalism,” Marcus told the Financial Times. “Capitalism is the basis of Home Depot, [and] millions of people have earned this success and had success. I’m talking manufacturers, vendors, and distributors, and people that work for us [who have been] able to enrich themselves by the journey of Home Depot. That’s the success. That’s why capitalism works.”
Marcus founded Home Depot alongside co-founder Arthur Blank in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1979 after the pair were unexpectedly fired from another home improvement chain. Since then, the store has expanded to more than 2,300 locations across North America.
In Marcus’ view, however, the company could not have achieved the same level of success if launched in today’s market.
“We would end up with 15, 16 stores,” he said. “I don’t know that we could go further.”
That change, along with a general lack of work ethic among the younger generation, can be attributed to the rise of socialism, according to the retailer.
“[N]obody works,” he said. “Nobody gives a damn. ‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work—I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid.’”
It’s A Woke World
Marcus further lamented an increasing lack of respect for the First Amendment, noting: “We used to have free speech here. We don’t have it. The woke people have taken over the world.”
The nonagenarian also acknowledged that, given his age, he is less susceptible to cancelation attempts, though that hasn’t stopped certain groups from trying.
In both 2016 and 2019, Marcus’ political support for former President Donald Trump angered some shoppers to the extent that they threatened to boycott Home Depot stores.
In 2019, while noting that he did not agree “with every move” Trump makes, Marcus told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he intended to donate to Trump’s reelection campaign because the then-president had “produced more than anybody else.”
Marcus also praised Trump for his “businessman’s common sense approach to most things,” holding that the United States was better off under the 45th president than it had been under the previous administration.
But while Home Depot sought to distance itself from its retired co-founder’s comments, Trump jumped to Marcus’ defense, urging his supporters to do the same.
“A truly great, patriotic & charitable man, Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot who, at the age of 90, is coming under attack by the Radical Left Democrats with one of their often used weapons,” Trump noted on Twitter in July 2019. “They don’t want people to shop at those GREAT stores because he contributed … to your favorite President, me!”
“Fight for Bernie Marcus and Home Depot!” Trump added.
Ultimately, those boycotts appear to have been unsuccessful, given that the company has an estimated annual revenue of $150 billion.
Republican Support
Marcus has been outspoken in his conservatism for years, attributing his views to a love of the United States and the freedoms Americans enjoy.
“I think there are two big reasons why this country is so great,” Marcus said in another 2019 interview. “The first is our Constitution, which guarantees a freedom of speech and expression. The second is our free market system.”
“The free market system has been the biggest creator of wealth and prosperity the world has ever known, lifting billions of people out of poverty and far more superior than any government program could ever be,” Marcus added. “The free market is the tool that allows many to reach out and grab hold of the American dream.”
Given his love of capitalism, the entrepreneur’s past support for Republican political campaigns—including the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain—should not come as a surprise.
And Trump is not the only Republican candidate to have recently earned Marcus’ support. As a Florida resident, the entrepreneur has also donated to the state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“I give money to [Trump and DeSantis] because I hope they’re going to do the right thing,” Marcus told The Financial Times.
While adding that he thought Trump’s policies as president were “spot on,” Marcus demurred on which Republican he would like to see replace Joe Biden in the oval office.
“It’s going to be very interesting in ‘24 because I think that DeSantis will challenge him [Trump],” he said. “And may the better man win.”
Article cross-posted from The Epoch Times.
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.