(The Economic Collapse Blog)—When I was a kid, “Weekend at Bernie’s” was one of my all-time favorite movies. In that film, two guys worked really hard to convince everyone that their boss was still alive so that they wouldn’t get into trouble. I remember laughing throughout that entire movie. Today, the Biden administration is working really hard to convince all of us that the U.S. economy is still alive, and that isn’t funny at all. A horrific cost of living crisis is absolutely crushing millions of U.S. households, large companies are conducting mass layoffs all over the nation, and the real estate industry is in a gigantic mess. But Joe Biden and his minions would have us believe that everything is just fine.
What we are witnessing is so similar to a very shocking incident that recently happened in Brazil.
A very disturbed woman, seeking a loan, actually wheeled a corpse into a local bank…
Now Joe Biden, seeking another term, is wheeling out the corpse of the U.S. economy and pretending that it is still alive.
But no matter how many fake numbers they give us, we all know the truth.
Last week, I came across a very sad post by an elderly man on a popular Internet forum, and it was one of the most heartbreaking things that I have read in a very long time…
For the first time ever, the wife went to the local food bank yesterday. We had dinner last night because she did. My heart is crushed. I have always been able to keep food in our house. We met in 84 , married in 92 and we have had some tough times sure enough. But it’s never been like this. I don’t know how people are making it. Our bills are all paid. So we are indeed fortunate. The past two years has been an ever increasing decline in our ability to make ends meet. The cost of literally everything has taken what we use to put in the bank for road trips to the coast or mountains. Now we can’t afford to even feed ourselves.
How much more are you going to take from us? You democrats have brought us low. Now we can’t even afford to eat. The wife and I are thin anyways. The wife, she weighs maybe 95 pounds. I can not let her go without food. Now I will never retire. I will die with my work boots on.
Am I alone in this? Am I the only one who has lost so much just in the last two years? Are we the only couple going without food? In all my years things have never been this bad.
Are you democrats proud of yourselves? Is this what you wanted? An elderly couple who worked their whole lives Now begging for food?
This elderly man is employed.
But the cost of living crisis has gotten so bad that he and his wife literally cannot afford enough food to eat.
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This is our economy now.
And with each passing day, even more American workers are being laid off.
In fact, we just learned that Nike has decided to lay off hundreds of workers at their world headquarters…
US athletic footwear and apparel company Nike announced late in the cash session on Friday that it is undergoing a restructuring effort to trim costs at its World Headquarters (WHQ) located in Beaverton, Oregon.
Michele Adams, VP of People Solutions at Nike, might be the most hated person at the company this afternoon. In a letter to staff, she wrote that “approximately 740 employees at WHQ” will be “permanently” laid off by late June.
No job in the private sector is truly safe at this point.
In recent months, we have seen dozens of large companies in the U.S. conduct mass layoffs.
And a lot more layoffs will be coming in the months ahead.
Meanwhile, the real estate industry continues to tank.
Last month, sales of previously owned homes were down 4.3 percent…
Sales of previously owned homes dropped 4.3% in March compared with February, to a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 4.19 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors. Sales were 3.7% lower than in March 2023.
High interest rates are killing home sales, and they are absolutely devastating the commercial real estate industry.
But the Federal Reserve is scared to reduce interest rates at this point, because that will just make our cost of living crisis even worse.
They have trapped themselves in a no win situation.
After years of incredibly bad decisions, those that are running our economy are out of good options.
But even though economic conditions are so bad right now, Joe Biden and his minions would like us to believe that everything is just great and that a new golden age of prosperity is right around the corner…
It is mind-blowing that Biden’s campaign ads still claim he helped the ordinary American worker. The economic bad news just keeps coming, as inflation climbs up and up in spite of propaganda to the contrary, real wages drop, and the value of the dollar goes down both at home and abroad. And even while real wages are decreasing, inflation is costing Americans an estimated $1,000 extra every month.
The rich are doing well, but the rest of us are struggling. The wealthiest Americans reportedly increased their fortunes by $195 billion just in Biden’s first 100 days in office back in 2021, and it didn’t stop there. Economist Dave Brat noted on April 10 that the wealth of America’s top 1% hit a record $44 trillion. The top 1% own half of our country’s individually held stocks, while 87% of such stocks and mutual funds belong to the top 10% of Americans.
Biden’s economy helps the uber-rich, but it is absolutely disastrous for ordinary Americans.
If you are ultra-wealthy, you are probably doing extremely well in this economic environment.
But just about everyone else is really struggling.
We really do have a “Weekend at Bernie’s economy”, and the Democrats really do have a “Weekend at Bernie’s candidate”…
That video would be a lot funnier if it wasn’t so true.
By now, most of you realize that this story is not going to end well.
In my latest book entitled “Chaos”, I included a lot of practical tips that will help you get prepared for what is ahead of us.
A major economic meltdown has already begun, but we are still only in the early chapters.
And it has become exceedingly clear that the guys that are currently running the show are definitely not equipped to lead us out of this mess.
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.