(The Economic Collapse Blog)—If you have plenty of money and you are able to shield yourself from what is happening to the tens of millions of people that are wallowing in poverty, life in America is still good in 2024. Stock prices have been hovering near record highs, and companies that cater to the rich and famous have been raking in the cash. But for most of the rest of the country, things are not going so well. Homelessness has been rising at the fastest rate we have ever seen, crime is out of control all over the nation, and large companies are laying off workers at a very frightening pace.
If you live in the version of America that is still living the high life, good for you.
But if you live in the version of America that the rest of us live in, conditions are rapidly deteriorating.
Earlier today, I came across an article in the San Francisco Standard that detailed what life is like in Oakland, California these days…
A Prius hanging out of a dumpster. Stripped-down cars. Burning trash cans. These are some of the East Oakland sights set to a new catchphrase that’s blowing up on social media: “Oakland, California, … donde la vida no vale nada.”
Even cops, government officials, firefighters and kids are repeating the catchphrase on social media and on the streets of the Town.
That catchphrase was created by a man named Gregorio Ramon. He has posted hundreds of videos on social media that document what is happening to the city where he has his home…
It’s all because of Gregorio Ramon, who coined the saying in videos on his Instagram @oakland_california_2023 and TikTok @gregorio1976 accounts documenting crime and mayhem in the East Bay city. Since mid-2022, Ramon has been capturing footage of everything from police chases to cars on fire and the boarded-up Denny’s that closed last month due to public safety concerns.
In every video, he says, “Oakland, California, … donde la vida no vale nada, donde la cuidad nos tiene abandonados.” The phrase translates to English as, “Oakland, California, … where life is worthless, where the city has abandoned us.”
Of course the same thing could be said about our nation as a whole.
While the elite are swimming in money, homelessness in the U.S. has reached “the highest level on record” and it also has been rising at the fastest pace ever recorded. The following comes from the Wall Street Journal…
The U.S. count of homeless people surged to the highest level on record, reaching more than 653,000 people early this year as Covid-19 pandemic-aid spending faded, new federal data show.
The increase reflects a collision of factors: rising housing costs; limited affordable housing units; the opioid epidemic; and the expired pandemic-era aid that had helped keep people in their homes, federal officials said Friday. A surge of migrants into shelters in places such as New York City, Massachusetts and Chicago also contributed to the challenge.
The data released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development show a 12% gain since last year, marking both the biggest increase and highest tally since the U.S. first published comparable data for 2007.
Homelessness didn’t even increase this fast during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009.
On top of those that are living in the streets, millions of other Americans are living in cars, trucks, vans and RVs.
In some of our wealthiest cities, you can see such vehicles lined up on the side of the road for miles.
Areas that are right along a river or a lake are particularly popular for those living in their vehicles because that gives them easy access to water. Of course millions of Americans that actually have homes are also living in poverty.
Today, approximately one out of every eight Americans is on food stamps. Just think about that for a moment. One-eighth of the entire country relies on the government for food every month. Sadly, things are only going to get worse as economic conditions continue to deteriorate.
The cost of living just continues to become even more oppressive, and at this stage buying a decent home is out of reach for most Americans. As a result, “mini-homes” and “tiny homes” have become extremely popular.
One 23-year-old man that recently purchased a 600 square foot one-bedroom “mini-home” from Amazon was very excited that he was able to get it “for just under $27,000”…
A man has taken people inside a house that he bought off Amazon after it was delivered to his doorstep.
Last month, Jeff Bryant, 23, of Los Angeles, decided to purchase a prefabricated, one-bedroom mini-home off the online marketplace for just under $27,000.
‘B**ch I didn’t even think twice about it, I just did it!’ he admitted in an initial TikTok video about the buy.
‘I don’t even know where I’m going to put the house!’
It certainly beats living in the streets.
But this is not what “the American Dream” is supposed to look like.
In some parts of the country, entire subdivisions of small homes are popping up…
Robert Lanter lives in a 600-square-foot house that can be traversed in five seconds and vacuumed from a single outlet. He doesn’t have a coffee table in the living room because it would obstruct the front door. When relatives come to visit, Mr. Lanter says jokingly, but only partly, they have to tour one at time.
Each of these details amounts to something bigger, for Mr. Lanter’s life and the U.S. housing market: a house under $300,000, something increasingly hard to find. That price allowed Mr. Lanter, a 63-year-old retired nurse, to buy a new single-family home in a subdivision in Redmond, Ore., about 30 minutes outside Bend, where he is from and which is, along with its surrounding area, one of Oregon’s most expensive housing markets.
Mr. Lanter’s house could easily fit on a flatbed truck, and is dwarfed by the two-story suburban homes that prevail on the blocks around him. But, in fact, there are even smaller homes in his subdivision, Cinder Butte, which was developed by a local builder called Hayden Homes. Some of his neighbors live in houses that total just 400 square feet — a 20-by-20-foot house attached to a 20-by-20-foot garage.
Much earlier in my life, I actually lived in an apartment that was about 400 square feet.
It wasn’t pleasant.
But in this economy, people are just trying to survive.
And things are not going to get any easier in 2024. In fact, CNBC is warning that large companies all over America are focusing on cutting costs this year…
Corporate America has a message for Wall Street: It’s serious about cutting costs this year.
From toy and cosmetics makers to office software sellers, executives across sectors have announced layoffs and other plans to slash expenses — even at some companies that are turning a profit. Barbie maker Mattel, PayPal, Cisco, Nike, Estée Lauder and Levi Strauss are just a few of the firms that have cut jobs in recent weeks.
Department store retailer Macy’s said it will close five of its namesake department stores and cut more than 2,300 jobs. JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines have offered staff buyouts, while United Airlines cut first-class meals on some of its shortest flights.
So many people are going to lose their jobs during the months ahead.
It is going to be such a difficult time, and even Citi’s chief economist is publicly admitting that it appears that the U.S. is heading into a recession this year…
The soft-landing dream is over; instead, the US economy is headed for a recession in the middle of 2024, Citi says.
“There’s this very powerful and seductive narrative around a soft landing, and we’re just not seeing it in the data,” Citi’s chief US economist, Andrew Hollenhorst, said in a CNBC interview.
He is quite right.
The numbers are telling us a very troubling story.
If you think that things are bad now, you will definitely not like what is coming.
With each passing day, more Americans are going to be falling out of the middle class. And with each passing day, more Americans are going to be falling into poverty. But if you are wealthy, there is still a little bit of time left to live the high life.
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, and a day of reckoning is rapidly approaching 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.