Have you noticed that a lot of big companies have been conducting mass layoffs recently? At this point, it has become exceedingly clear that a major economic slowdown has begun, and payrolls are being feverishly slashed at a rate that we haven’t seen in a long time. In fact, the number of job cuts in November 2022 was 417 percent higher than it was in November 2021. Unfortunately, what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning. We are being warned that a couple million more Americans could lose their jobs in 2023, and the vast majority of the population is simply not prepared for such a scenario. In fact, a new survey that was just released found that 63 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck…
As of November, 63% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck, according to a monthly LendingClub report — up from 60% the previous month and near the 64% historic high hit in March.
Even high-income earners are under pressure, LendingClub found. Of those earning more than six figures, 47% reported living paycheck to paycheck, a jump from the previous month’s 43%.
When you are just barely scraping by from month to month, a job loss can be absolutely debilitating.
Sadly, this year many large corporations aren’t even waiting until after the holidays to give the axe to thousands of highly dedicated employees…
There is arguably no good time for companies to lay off employees, of course, but as farewell-to-my-job posts continue to populate LinkedIn, many are wondering, why did they have to do this the week before Thanksgiving or right before Christmas?
Despite the job market’s overall strength, big names in tech including Meta Platforms Inc., Salesforce Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have all laid off workers or announced plans to do so in recent months. Thousands of job cuts have also hit other industries, with Ford Motor Co., Walmart Inc. and PepsiCo Inc. all reducing their head counts, leaving many employees to wonder: Could I be next?
Are things really so bad that these giant firms couldn’t have waited a few weeks?
“Happy Thanksgiving! By the way, you’re fired.”
When I was growing up, big companies at least pretended to be compassionate.
But now corporate giants seem to feel free to let workers go the instant that their usefulness is over…
Layoffs around the holidays are a relatively recent phenomenon. In the 1970s and 1980s, companies were more cognizant of the optics of putting people out of work during the most wonderful time of the year, says Andy Challenger, a senior vice president with Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a career services and executive-coaching firm.
That sentiment has passed, he says. “Today we tend to see companies making the cuts when they feel like they need to.”
Apparently the Washington Post will also be laying off quite a few workers in the days ahead.
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When staff members learned that job cuts would soon be coming, they were not happy.
Needless to say, the Washington Post is far from alone.
In fact, several other very large media companies have also recently announced cutbacks…
Of course, the news of the layoffs comes amid a horrible backdrop for the media industry at large. In recent weeks, CNN has laid off hundreds of staffers, Gannett has cut 200 staffers, NPR has said it needs to find $10 million in savings, and other organizations have implemented moves to slash costs.
Even though so many big names have been slashing workers, the government has continued to insist that everything is just fine.
And each month they have told us that the U.S. economy has continued to gain jobs.
But now the truth of what has really been going on is starting to become quite obvious. In fact, even the Philly Fed is now publicly admitting that the number of jobs in this country has been overstated by the government by at least a million…
Remember what we said in July when we first looked at the March-June divergence between the Household and Establishment survey: we said that “since March, the Establishment Survey shows a gain of 1.124 million jobs while the Household Survey shows an employment loss of 347K!” Said otherwise, we found that payrolls “calculated” by the Establishment Survey were overestimated by 1.5 million. Shockingly, the Philly Fed seems to agree, and reports that instead of the roughly 1.1 million jobs reported by the BLS, only 10,500 new jobs were added!
As the tsunami of layoffs continues to accelerate, it is probably just a matter of time before the U.S. economy starts losing large numbers of jobs every month.
That is exactly what several of the largest financial institutions on Wall Street are now projecting, and we continue to get more evidence that economic conditions are really starting to slow down.
On Thursday, we learned that U.S. retail sales actually declined during the month of November…
U.S. retail spending and manufacturing weakened in November, signs of a slowing economy as the Federal Reserve continues its battle against high inflation.
November retail sales fell 0.6% from the prior month for the biggest decline this year, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Budget-conscious shoppers pulled back sharply on holiday-related purchases, home projects and autos. Manufacturing output declined 0.6%, the first drop since June, the Fed said in a separate report.
But apparently economic conditions are not yet bad enough for the officials at the Federal Reserve, because they just decided to raise interest rates even higher…
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest level in 15 years, indicating the fight against inflation is not over despite some promising signs lately.
Keeping with expectations, the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee voted to boost the overnight borrowing rate half a percentage point, taking it to a targeted range between 4.25% and 4.5%. The increase broke a string of four straight three-quarter point hikes, the most aggressive policy moves since the early 1980s.
What the Federal Reserve is doing is absolutely suicidal.
They have just ensured that unemployment will go even higher, that our new housing crash will get even worse and that a very painful economic downturn is coming in 2023.
In the aftermath of the Fed’s decision, the Dow was down 764 points on Thursday…
Investors dumped stocks on Thursday as more headwinds emerge for the U.S. economy as the Federal Reserve stays the course in raising interest rates.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 764 points, or 2.2%, as the broader markets faced the worst session since November.
The mood on Wall Street is quite glum right now.
The outlook for 2023 is not good, and the outlook for the years beyond 2023 is even worse.
Our leaders have been making incredibly bad decisions for decades, and now we are starting to pay the price.
There is going to be so much pain during the year ahead, and the vast majority of the population is not prepared for what is coming at all.
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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.