(The Economic Collapse Blog)—There is a reason why I am watching the banks so carefully. The banks are the beating heart of our economic system, and so if they get into big trouble we will all feel the pain. That is precisely what happened in 2008, and that is precisely what is happening again right now. In recent months there have been endless banking “glitches”, banks have been shutting down hundreds of branches and laying off thousands of workers, and lenders are getting really tight with their money because they are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of unrealized losses. And just in time for Thanksgiving, three of our “too big to fail” banks have had their ratings downgraded by Moody’s Investors Service…
Moody’s Investors Service cut its rating outlook to negative from stable on Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co., but the stocks rallied Tuesday on the heels of tame inflation data.
The big news networks really haven’t talked much about this.
Why is that?
To me, this is a really big deal.
When push comes to shove, the “too big to fail” banks will be looking to the federal government to bail them out, but the financial position of the federal government just continues to get weaker and weaker…
Analyst Peter E. Nerby of Moody’s said that the worsening outlook on bank debt was due to “the potentially weaker capacity of the government of the United States of America (Aaa negative) to support the U.S.’s systemically important banks.”
In particular, JPMorgan’s downgrade was partially because the bank runs a “complex” capital markets business that may post “substantial” risks to its creditors.
For now, most Americans still seem to have faith in the stability of the banking system.
And that is good news.
But problem signs continue to erupt all around us.
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In fact, Wells Fargo just permanently shut down 13 branches in a single week…
Six banks filed to close almost 40 branches last week leaving millions of Americans without access to vital financial services, with Wells Fargo alone axing 13 locations.
Wells Fargo has been a leader in the closure of branches around the country, having closed 160 in the first half of the year, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
When financial institutions get into trouble, they start getting really right with their money.
And according to a report that was just released by the Federal Reserve, the rate of credit rejection has risen substantially over the past year…
Reported rejection rates among applicants increased by 2.1 percentage points to 20.1% in 2023 from 18.0% in 2022, well above its 2019 level of 17.6%.
I fully expect that number to go even higher in 2024.
An excruciating credit crunch has begun, and that means that we are heading into a very tough economic environment.
Just look at what is already happening to home sales.
Today, we learned that existing home sales in the United States have fallen to the lowest level since 2010…
Existing home sales tumbled 4.1% last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.79 million units, the lowest level since August 2010 when the sales were declining following the expiration of a government tax credit for homebuyers.
That is horrible!
And Zero Hedge has pointed out that on a year over year basis existing home sales are now down a total of 14.6 percent…
With housing affordability at its lowest since at least the early 1980s, (and homebuilder sentiment slumping as mortgage rates rose), it’s no surprise that analysts expected existing home sales in October to tumble 1.5% MoM.
Sales actually fell 4.1% MoM (far worse than expected and down for the 20th time in the last 23 months) with September’s 2.0% MoM decline revised even lower to -2.2% MoM. That decline left existing home sales down 14.6% YoY…
This feels so much like 2008.
And just like the Great Recession, consumers are starting to pull back on their spending on a widespread basis…
Shoppers will be splurging less this holiday than in past years, major retailers say.
Best Buy, Lowe’s and Kohl’s all reported sales declines during their most recent quarter Tuesday and are forecasting holiday sales to drop from a year ago.
“Consumer demand has been even more uneven and difficult to predict,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said in a statement, noting that the company “prepared for a customer who is very deal-focused.”
Earlier this week, I wrote an entire article about the severe troubles that U.S. consumers are experiencing right now.
The cost of living has been rising much faster than paychecks have, and as a result U.S. consumers just don’t have a lot of discretionary income to spend.
The mainstream media continues to insist that the U.S. economy is doing just fine, but survey after survey has shown that most Americans are extremely displeased with how things are going economically.
The bottom 80 percent of income earners has gotten poorer over the past several years, and now our economic problems are accelerating. But as bad as things are now, the truth is that they will get even worse in 2024 and beyond.
The shaking of our banks will intensify during the months to come, and that is going to put an incredible amount of stress on the entire system. Unfortunately, our system is simply not able to handle much stress at all at this point…
Sound off about this development on the Economic Collapse Substack.
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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.