(The Economic Collapse Blog)—History is starting to repeat itself. In 2008, bond prices crashed before stock prices did. Here in 2023, bond prices are crashing again. In fact, we are currently witnessing one of the greatest financial crashes in U.S. history at this moment. Of course most Americans have absolutely no idea that this is happening. Most Americans don’t know anything about the bond crash that is causing a tremendous amount of fear in the financial community right now, and that is because the big news networks aren’t talking about it too much. But it is serious. Since the peak of the market, 10 year bonds are down 46 percent and 30 year bonds are down 53 percent…
Losses on longer-dated Treasuries are beginning to rival some of the most notorious market meltdowns in US history.
Bonds maturing in 10 years or more have slumped 46% since peaking in March 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s just shy of the 49% plunge in US stocks in the aftermath of the dot-com bust at the turn of the century. The rout in 30-year bonds has been even worse, tumbling 53%, nearing the 57% slump in equities during the depths of the financial crisis.
We haven’t seen anything like this in many years.
As bond yields go up, bond prices go down.
And the last time the yield on 10 year bonds rose to this level was “just before the 2008 financial crisis”…
At the center of the storm is the 10-year Treasury yield, one of the most influential numbers in finance. The yield, which represents borrowing costs for issuers of bonds, has climbed steadily in recent weeks and reached 4.8% on Tuesday, a level last seen just before the 2008 financial crisis.
We are witnessing the exact same pattern that we witnessed in 2008 and during other financial panics.
Bonds crash first, and then stocks crash later.
I have warned over and over again that high interest rates were going to have an absolutely devastating impact on our system, and now it is staring to happen.
Our banks are going to be in so much trouble. They were already sitting on hundreds of billons of dollars in unrealized losses, and the spike in bond yields in recent weeks has pushed that number even higher.
Meanwhile, mortgage rates continue to soar…
Freddie Mac’s latest Primary Mortgage Market Survey released Thursday shows the average rate for the benchmark 30-year fixed-rate mortgage jumped to 7.49%, up from 7.31% last week and from 6.66% a year ago.
The rate for a 15-year mortgage also climbed, averaging 6.78% after coming in last week at 6.72%. One year ago, the rate on a 15-year fixed note averaged 5.9%.
These high rates are absolutely paralyzing the housing market.
Millions of potential buyers have been forced to the sidelines, because high rates have made housing “unaffordable” in 99 percent of all U.S. counties…
Housing prices are growing more unaffordable even with the astronomical rise in mortgage rates, putting ownership out of reach for millions of Americans.
That’s according to a new report published by real estate data provider ATTOM, which examined 572 U.S. counties and determined that median home prices in 99% of those areas are out of reach for the average income earner, who makes about $71,214 annually.
“The latest trend continues a two-year pattern of homeownership getting more and more difficult for average U.S. wage earners,” the report said.
The home prices that we are seeing today are absolutely insane.
Recently, a 565 square foot house in West Hollywood “sold for a whopping $1.1 million”…
A miniature home in Los Angeles’ West Hollywood neighborhood recently sold for a whopping $1.1 million despite only offering 565 square feet inside.
The 1924 Craftsman-bungalow – settled on a 2.240 square foot lot – is tucked away behind a row of hedges and located just across the street from a fire station.
I couldn’t imagine paying that much for a glorified closet. But apparently someone out there had money to burn.
Of course most homes are not selling at this point. In fact, sales of existing homes have fallen by about a third over the past year. So something has got to give. Either the Federal Reserve has got to dramatically reduce interest rates or home prices have got to fall. And the Federal Reserve is not planning to reduce interest rates any time soon.
Unfortunately, Fed officials keep talking about the possibility of raising them even higher. So a lot more pain is coming, and the American people are getting restless.
If you can believe it, a recent Rasmussen survey discovered that more than half of all U.S. adults believe that we will experience “another Great Depression” within the next few years…
Despite claims by President Joe Biden about the strength of America’s economy, most Americans still think we’re headed toward another Great Depression.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 52% of American Adults believe it is likely that, over the next few years, the United States will enter a 1930s-like depression, including 21% who say a major depression is Very Likely. Thirty-six percent (36%) don’t think another Great Depression is likely over the next few years, including 11% who say it’s Not At All Likely. Another 11% are not sure.
Even though they may not understand the specifics, most Americans can feel that something has gone horribly wrong. But things didn’t have to turn out this way.
You see, the truth is that we didn’t learn our lessons from the last financial crisis. Instead of fixing the system, we created bubbles that were even bigger. Now that bonds have crashed, it is just a matter of time before stocks crash too. And we are headed for an economic meltdown of epic proportions.
The months and years ahead are going to be incredibly challenging. So I hope that you have been preparing for difficult times, because the nightmare that many of us have been warning about has already begun.
Sound off about this article on our Economic Collapse Substack.
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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.