(The Economic Collapse Blog)—I used to really enjoy going to the grocery store. I would relentlessly hunt for deals, and I would show off what I was able to find when I got home. But now all of the bargains are gone. Instead, there are ridiculous prices and there are even more ridiculous prices.
The prices for some of the things that I normally buy have doubled. In other cases, the prices have almost doubled. Of course the soaring cost of living is the direct result of decisions that our leaders have made. They just kept borrowing, spending and flooding the system with money, and now the cost of living is wildly out of control.
According to CBS News, on average U.S. households must now spend an extra $11,434 per year just to maintain the same standard of living that they were enjoying when Joe Biden first entered the White House…
The typical American household must spend an additional $11,434 annually just to maintain the same standard of living they enjoyed in January of 2021, right before inflation soared to 40-year highs, according to a recent analysis of government data.
This is insane. But the government continues to insist that inflation is low. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Lying Statistics told us that prices have only risen 3.2 percent over the past 12 months…
Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday showed prices rose 3.2 percent over last year, slightly outpacing forecasts of 3.1 percent. Prices also rose 0.4 percent in February over the previous month — in line with expectations, but still hotter than economists would like to see.
If you believe that, there is a bridge in California that I would like to sell you.
Virtually everything that Americans spend money on regularly has skyrocketed during the Biden administration.
Just look at the price of gasoline. It is now 60 percent higher than it was during the last presidential election in November 2020…
The average gasoline price at the pump in the US is now 60% higher than at the start of November 2020 — a potentially significant factor for American voters when comparing how well-off they feel now versus when President Joe Biden was first elected. And while pump prices are rising relatively slowly for this time of year, US fuel stockpiles well below seasonal norms will keep refining margins elevated, according to the the US Energy Information Administration.
As a result, the agency on Tuesday raised its second-quarter retail gasoline price forecast by 20 cents a gallon.
Of course housing costs have been going up even faster.
Recently, I was stunned to learn that a 54 square foot “apartment” in New York City that doesn’t even have a bathroom is renting for $1,200 a month…
A tiny studio apartment in New York City that consists of just one room and has no bathroom, kitchen or running water has been furiously slated online – after it was revealed the asking price for the cell-like property is a staggering $1,200 a month.
A now-viral video of the ‘tiny’ rental, which is just 54 square feet and is located in Midtown West, has sparked outrage after it was shared on TikTok by listing agent Alexander Bruni.
The nine-by-six apartment has just enough space for a bed and doesn’t have any running water, meaning that if residents needed to use the restroom they would have to exit their studio and go down the hallway to the communal bathroom.
Is this what they mean when they tell us that we will own nothing and be happy?
Of course most Americans are not happy about the current state of affairs at all.
They are quite aware that the cost of living has been rising much faster than their paychecks have, and that is definitely not good news for Joe Biden.
As Kevin O’Leary has very astutely observed, inflation “is always the enemy of the incumbent”…
He said: ‘Inflation is always the enemy of the incumbent. It doesn’t matter who you are in the White House when there’s inflation. People go to the voting booth remembering what it cost them for their cornflakes and milk in the morning, and what it cost to fill up the car to drive there.
‘And they vote against that.’
But if you think that inflation is bad now, just wait until the coming war with China erupts.
Once trade across the Pacific comes to a standstill, there will be a whole lot of money chasing a rapidly dwindling level of goods in our stores.
The employment market will be another major issue in November. The massive tsunami of layoffs that we have been witnessing just continues to roll along. For example, on Monday we learned that John Deere will be laying off 150 workers at a facility in Iowa…
Around 150 John Deere workers in Ankeny will be losing their jobs over the next couple of months.
John Deere Des Moines Works confirmed to Iowa’s News Now that employees were told about the layoffs by factory leadership in meetings at the factory on Friday.
The company said about 150 production employees will be placed on “indefinite layoff effective over the months of April and May.”
Sticking with Iowa, Tyson just announced that it will be giving the axe to over a thousand workers at one of their plants in the state…
More than 1,000 workers at another Tyson Food plant are out of work after the company announced it is permanently closing one of its Iowa facilities.
The move comes after the Arkansas-based company closed two chicken plants and announced job cuts last year and said four other plants were expected to cease operations within the first half of fiscal 2024, with related charges − at the time, expected to cost the company $300 million to $400 million.
On Monday Tyson announced it would shutter the doors to its Perry, Iowa pork-packing plant.
But at least they are doing better than Rite Aid is.
We just learned that another 77 Rite Aid stores will be permanently shutting down…
Another 77 Rite Aid stores will close as part of the retailer’s voluntary bankruptcy.
The closures, announced in seven court filings so far this year, will affect stores across 21 states, including California, Pennsylvania, New York and Texas.
The total number of closures announced since filing for bankruptcy in October is now 431.
Overall, nearly 107 million Americans do not have a job right now.
That number will inevitably go even higher during the months ahead.
Needless to say, the cost of living is going to continue to steadily increase as well.
Prices are already absurdly high, but they are only going to escalate from here, and that is really bad news for all of us.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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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.