Perhaps one of the most bizarre recent developments in economic news has been the attempt by establishment media (and the White House) to declare US inflation “defeated” despite all the facts to the contrary. Keep in mind that when these people talk about inflation, they are only talking about the most recent CPI, which is supposed to be a measure of current inflation growth, not a measure of inflation already accumulated. But, the CPI is easily manipulated, and focus on that index alone is a tactic for misleading the public on the true economic danger.
The way current US inflation is presented might seem like a fiscal miracle. How did America cut CPI so quickly while the rest of the world including Europe is still dealing with continuing distress? Is “Bidenomics” really an economic powerhouse?
No, it’s definitely not. I have addressed this issue in previous articles but I’ll dig into inflation specifically, because I believe a renewed inflationary run is about to spark off in the near term and I suspect the public is being misinformed to keep them unprepared.
First, lets be clear that there are four types of inflation – Creeping, walking, galloping and hyperinflation. We also should distinguish between monetary inflation and price inflation, because they are not always directly related (usually they are, but events outside of money printing can also cause prices to go up).
If we calculate CPI according to the same methods used during the stagflationary crisis of the 1980s, real inflation has been in the double digits for the past couple years. This constitutes galloping inflation, a very dangerous condition that can lead to a depression event.
There are multiple triggers for the inflation spike. The primary cause was tens-of-trillions of dollars in monetary stimulus created by the Federal Reserve, the majority of which took place on the watch of Barack Obama and Joe Biden (there have been multiple GOP Republicans that have also supported these measures, but the majority of dollar devaluation is directly related to Democrat policies). This epic “too big to fail” stimulus created an avalanche effect in which economic weakness accumulated like sheets of ice on a mountainside. The final straw was the covid lockdowns and the $8 trillion+ in stimulus packages pumped directly into the system. Then, it all came crashing down.
To give you a sense of how bad the situation is, we can take a look at the Fed’s M2 money supply (they stopped reporting the more complete M3 money supply right before the crash of 2008). According to the M2, the amount of dollars in circulation jumped around 40% in the span of only two years. That is an epic amount of money creation and I would argue that the economy still hasn’t processed all of it yet.
There have been too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. Thus, prices rise dramatically, with the cost of necessities increasing by 25%-50%. Think about that for a moment…it now costs us 25%-50% more per year to live than it did before 2020, and it’s not over by a long shot. Houshold costs are still climbing, and since inflation is cumulative we will likely never be rid of the increases that are already in place. But if that’s the reality, why is CPI going down?
The main reason has been the central bank pumping up interest rates. The more expensive debt becomes, the more the economy slows down. That said, the Fed has remained hawkish for a reason; they know that inflation is not going away. They need help if they’re going to convince the public that inflation is no longer a problem.
Enter Biden’s scheme of dumping America’s strategic oil reserves on the market as a means to artificially bring down CPI. Energy prices affect almost all other aspects of the CPI index, and when energy costs fall this make it seem like inflation has been tamed. The problem is that it’s a short term fraud. Biden has run out of reserves to dilute the market and the cost of refilling them is going to be exponentially higher. This is why you now see gas prices rising again and they will probably keep rising through the rest of the year.
On top of this there are also geopolitical factors to consider. The White House has earmarked over $100 billion in aid to Ukraine – A proxy war is one good way to circulate fiat dollars overseas as a means to reduce monetary inflation at home, but it’s not going to be enough unless the war expands considerably. Then there is the problem of export disruptions.
For example, Russia is now officially and aggressively shutting down Ukraine’s wheat and grain exports, which is going to cause another price spike in wheat and all foods that use wheat. India just shut down major exports of rice to protect their domestic supply, meaning rice is going to rocket in price. And, there’s an overall trend of foriegn creditors quietly dumping the US dollar as the world reserve currency. All those dollars will eventually make their way back to the US, meaning an even larger money supply circulating domestically with higher inflation as a result.
The Fed doesn’t necessarily have to keep printing for inflation to persist, they just had to set the chain reaction in motion. The recent Fitch downgrade of the US credit rating is not going to help matters as it encourages foreign investors to dump the dollar and treasuries even faster.
To be sure, there is still the matter of the battle between deflationary factors vs inflationary factors. In October, the last vestiges of covid stimlus measures will finally die, including the moratorium on student loan debt payments – That’s trillions of dollars of loans pulling billions in payments each year.
Not only that, but when those loans were put on hold, millions of people magically had their credit ratings rise, which means they had access to higher credit card limits and a vast pool of debt. Now, that’s all going away, too. No more living off Visa and Mastercard means US retail is about to take a considerable hit along with the jobs market.
Then there’s the Fed’s interest rate hikes which are now about as high as they were right before the crash of 2008. The same hikes that helped cause the spring banking crisis (which is also not over). The US will be paying record interest on the national debt, consumers will be using far less credit and banks will be lending less and less money.
So yes, there will be competing forces pulling the economy in two different directions: Inflation and deflation. However, I would argue that inflation is not done with us yet and that the Fed will have to hike a few more times to suppress it in the short term. In the long term, the viability of the US dollar is the issue, but that’s a discussion for another article…
Article cross-posted from Alt-Market.
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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.