(The Economic Collapse Blog)—U.S. consumers are getting weaker and weaker and weaker. Today, debt levels have risen to unprecedented heights, but thanks to roaring inflation our standard of living has been steadily going down. Most Americans are working extremely hard, but they have very little to show for it. And now the latest economic downturn is really starting to bite. Layoffs are starting to surge again, once thriving businesses are shutting down all over the nation, and hunger and homelessness are exploding. If economic conditions continue to deteriorate at this pace, what will things look like a year from now?
For decades, we have been able to count on U.S. consumers to just keep spending money no matter what the economic outlook was, but now things have changed.
The following are 11 signs that U.S. consumers are in very serious trouble as we head into the final stretch of 2023…
#1 U.S. renters are spending 30 percent of their incomes just on rent…
Renters remained burdened in the U.S. during the third quarter of 2023 despite a slight improvement as insurance costs to landlords mounted, according to a new report by Moody’s Analytics.
Moody’s Analytics found that in Q3, the U.S. rent-to-income ratio (RTI) declined slightly by 0.5% and ended at 30%, a level that is the threshold for being rent-burdened. Renters are considered “burdened” if their rent payments consume 30% or more of their gross, or pre-tax, income. This comes after last year marked the first time that the median renter household in the U.S. paid over 30% of their income on an average-priced apartment when the national RTI reached a high of 30.8%.
#2 One food bank executive just told USA Today that she is seeing “the worst rate of hunger in my career” right now…
“This is the worst rate of hunger in my career,” said Morgan, who has worked at food banks in Boston, San Francisco and Anchorage, Alaska. “It’s so large, it’s hard to wrap your head around.”
#3 Wells Fargo just shut down 13 bank branches in a single week…
Six banks filed to close almost 40 branches last week leaving millions of Americans without access to vital financial services, with Wells Fargo alone axing 13 locations.
Wells Fargo has been a leader in the closure of branches around the country, having closed 160 in the first half of the year, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
#4 Average hourly earnings for all employees have fallen by 3.32 percent since Joe Biden entered the White House…
Millions of Americans have received a pay cut over the past two years thanks to high inflation, a blow to President Biden as he attempts to center his re-election campaign around “Bidenomics.”
The Labor Department reported Tuesday that average hourly earnings for all employees was $11.05 in October — a 3.32% decline from the $11.43 figure in January 2021, when Biden took office.
#5 Due to a lack of consumer demand, three different major Burger King franchisees have recently declared bankruptcy…
Premier Kings, a 172-unit Burger King franchisee whose owner died in 2022, declared bankruptcy protection, saying that operating losses even after the company closed restaurants forced the issue.
It’s the third time this year that a major Burger King operator has taken such a step, while several others closed restaurants around the country in the aftermath of the chain’s sales and profit challenges.
#6 Vice Media has announced that it will be laying off dozens of staffers…
Vice Media, the one-time digital media darling that has seen its value and influence greatly diminish in recent years, moved on Thursday to further hollow out its once prestigious news division, shutting down several shows and laying off dozens of staffers.
#7 According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, almost 20,000 media jobs have already been eliminated this year…
Nearly 20,000 jobs have been eliminated across the media industry this year as of October, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
#8 Amazon is laying off hundreds of workers in its Alexa division…
Amazon on Friday said that it is cutting “several hundred” jobs within its Alexa division.
The layoffs come as the e-commerce giant is “shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers —which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI,” an Amazon spokesperson confirmed to FOX Business.
#9 Just in time for the holidays, Citigroup has decided to conduct large scale layoffs…
Citigroup will soon begin layoffs in CEO Jane Fraser’s corporate overhaul, CNBC has learned.
Employees affected by the cuts will be informed starting Wednesday, with new dismissals announced daily through early next week, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Those impacted will include chiefs of staff, managing directors and some lower-level employees, said the people. The cuts will spread to more rank-and-file staff by February, they added.
#10 As consumer wealth has dried up, federal tax receipts have been falling on a quarterly basis since the third quarter of 2022…
Rather, federal spending is rising even as federal revenues have fallen, year over year, for ten of the last twelve months. Moreover, on a quarterly basis, federal receipts have been falling—quarter-to-quarter—since the third quarter of 2022.
#11 80 percent of U.S. households are actually poorer than they were when the COVID pandemic originally hit this country…
As of June, the bottom 80% of households by income, when adjusted for inflation, had lower bank deposits and other liquid assets compared to their status in March 2020. The decline marks a significant shift from the initial phases of the pandemic, where various factors, including government financial support and restricted spending opportunities during lockdowns, led to an accumulation of excess savings.
Most Americans have been getting poorer, but the cost of living just keeps getting even more oppressive.
As a result, the middle class is literally being hollowed out.
The absolutely massive gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else has become an extremely pressing issue in this country, and it is going to lead to enormous civil unrest during the chaotic years that are ahead of us.
Our leaders were able to keep the economy propped up for a long time by injecting trillions of fresh dollars into the system.
But now the “endgame” has arrived, and it is going to be incredibly painful.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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.
