There is nothing wrong with being optimistic, but blind optimism can be a very dangerous thing. The reason why so many of the “experts” were shocked by the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 is because they didn’t want to believe that such a thing could happen. Unfortunately, we are witnessing a similar pattern now. Even though we are absolutely drowning in debt, inflation is wildly out of control, our currency is being transformed into toilet paper, the housing market has started to crash and mass layoffs are being conducted all over the nation, a lot of the “experts” continue to insist that everything is going to be just fine. For example, the following comes from a CNN article entitled “The case for a 2023 US recession is crumbling”…
Many CEOs, investors and economists had penciled in 2023 as the year when a recession would hit the American economy.
The thinking was that the US economy would grind to a halt because the Federal Reserve was effectively slamming the brakes to squash inflation. Businesses would lay off workers and inflation-weary Americans would slash spending.
Umm, I hate to interrupt CNN’s wishful thinking, but the reality is that businesses really are laying off workers.
In fact, the number of job cuts that have been announced through the first five months of this year is 315 percent higher than the number of job cuts that were announced through the first five months of last year.
And more workers are being laid off with each passing day. Earlier today, I was saddened to learn that Spotify has just decided that yet another round of layoffs has become necessary…
Just a few months after announcing a significant wave of layoffs, Spotify plans to conduct another round of layoffs. This time, the job cuts will affect the podcast division as part of a corporate reorganization. In particular, the company plans to merge Parcast and Gimlet Studios.
In an internal memo, Sahar Elhabashi, Spotify’s head of the podcast division, announced that the company was making changes that would lead to a workforce reduction of 2%. This change will affect around 200 jobs and those who are impacted have already received an invitation to talk with someone from the HR department.
Just like in 2008 and 2009, a lot of people that are losing their jobs are falling out of the middle class because they don’t have any sort of a cushion to fall back on.
The ranks of the hungry and the homeless are rapidly growing, and this has created an unprecedented crisis in many of our largest cities.
The homeless that are truly destitute tend to live in tents, but those that have at least a little bit of money often live in RVs. At this point, it is being estimated that over 11,000 homeless people are living in RVs in Los Angeles County alone…
There are, by the latest count, more than 11,000 people living in RVs across Los Angeles County. And that number has been rising. The Covid-19 pandemic forced more people into poverty. Some of the RV dwellers have jobs but either don’t want to pay apartment rent, or can’t afford to pay it, in a city where the average one-bedroom apartment costs around $2,500 a month.
Of course wherever there is a homelessness crisis there is almost always a drug crisis.
Open air drug markets now operate freely in communities all over the country, and there are some cities where drug abuse is so bad that authorities have completely given up on trying to control it.
One of those cities is San Francisco, and as a result real estate prices are falling there much faster than the national average…
The value of residential real estate in crime-ridden San Francisco has dropped significantly in recent years, with prices dropping by around 16.7%. This contrasts with a more moderate decline of 3.3% in the rest of the country, resulting in a difference of about 13.4 percentage points.
The decline in the housing market in San Francisco has resulted in an additional loss of approximately $260 billion in the value of residential real estate compared to what would have occurred if the city had followed the pattern shown nationally, according to the research center Hoover Institution.
Zillow, a real-estate marketplace company, projected that the value of San Francisco’s housing stock was close to $2 trillion before the price drop.
Needless to say, many addicts must steal stuff in order to fund their addictions, and so we have seen crime rates soar over the past several years.
In Chicago, things have gotten so bad that one Walgreens store has actually decided to put almost all of their merchandise “behind staffed counters”…
A Walgreens store in Chicago reportedly has been redesigned to allow customers to browse only two aisles of products – after they pass through anti-theft detectors.
The changes at the store on 2 E. Roosevelt Road in the South Loop area put most of the merchandise in aisles behind staffed counters, which customers can shop digitally through kiosks, according to Block Club Chicago.
Many other retailers are shutting down stores in cities such as Chicago, San Francisco and Portland permanently.
Our society is melting down right in front of our eyes, but don’t worry.
CNN says that everything is going to be just fine.
You believe them, don’t you?
The Chinese certainly aren’t buying it. In recent months they have been stockpiling enormous amounts of gold…
China added to its gold reserves for a sixth straight month, extending a flurry of purchases as central banks around the world expand their holdings of bullion amid escalating geopolitical and economic risks.
China raised its gold holdings by about 8.09 tons in April, according to data from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange on Sunday. Total stockpiles now sit at about 2,076 tons, after the nation increased reserves by about 120 tons in the five months through March.
Central banks have purchased large amounts of gold in the past year to diversify assets, as well as to protect reserves from the impact of a weakening dollar and rampant inflation.
The reason why the Chinese are stockpiling gold is because they can see that a global economic crisis is coming.
And everyone else should be able to see it too.
Conditions in the short-term are going to steadily get worse, and in the long-term they are going to get really bad.
But most Americans are just going to continue to trust our politicians and the “experts” on television that are assuring them that we are going to be able to avoid a major meltdown somehow.
So they aren’t going to do anything to get prepared, and in the end they will be absolutely blindsided by an economic tsunami that they were absolutely convinced would never come.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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.
I don’t want to upset the the applecart, but China might be playing an extreme hand of Black Jack. China wants Taiwan. China also wants access to the North Pole. The Western nations are feeding Ukraine their weapon reserves. Russia is depleting not only it’s war material, but it’s trained troops. Many are already lost and they will not be easily nor quickly replaced. If Russia becomes weak, China could roll North, almost to Santa’s Workshop. Taking and holding a strip 200-300 miles wide, probably won’t be difficult. Why?
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If Russia is so weakened by the Ukrainian war they won’t be able to respond, with the singular exception being a nuclear response. Russia would have to fight a 2 front war. Now, who doesn’t like 2 front wars? Maybe the senior Russian military would object. After all, if you’re a Russian General and you’ve been doing your duty for 40 years and expecting a big pay off, why would a 2 front war be in your best interests.
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If China takes Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands and the Kamchatka Peninsula, China could bargain with the Japanese for the Kurils, in exchange for Japan being neutral in any Taiwan/China conflict. Further, China would be much closer to NORAD, reducing warning times for missiles and allowing their ships to operate with much shorter lines of communications.
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To be sure, Taiwan is still coveted. Perhaps the long way around, might be less costly and more rewarding than a straight line approach.
Excuse me? China and Russia are allies. China is buying all the Gold because BRICS is about to go online and will feature a gold backed currency and the dollar will be finished on the world state. Russia is winning the Ukraine war with a death ratio of 7 Ukrainians dead to every one Russian dead. In total, Russia hasn’t even lost a division of men while Ukraine has lost their entire Army. You don’t know much about much, do you? Stop watching the MSM and stop using Google!
In a perfect world all democrats would die in prison.
Mike, You are delusional.