(Sovereign Man)—Public Law 93-373 was supposed to be so boring that Congress didn’t even bother to give it a name.
You know how most laws passed by Congress have some fancy name– like the “Inflation Reduction Act” or the “USA PATRIOT Act” or some such nonsense?
Well, on November 7, 1973, US Senator James Fulbright introduced a very short bill– it was only ONE page– that didn’t even have a name. But Fulbright’s unnamed bill ended up being one of the most important pieces of legislation in US history.
By the time Fulbright introduced his bill, it had been two years since the legendary “Nixon Shock” of 1971. That was when US President Richard Nixon implemented wage and price controls, and canceled the US dollar’s convertibility into gold.
Nixon famously promised the American public that there wouldn’t be any negative consequences from his actions. Yet inflation hit 3% the following year, in 1972. Then 4.7% in 1973. Then 11.2% in 1974.
Simultaneously, gold prices around the world were surging… from $35/ounce before the Nixon Shock, to more than $170 in 1974.
But individual Americans weren’t allowed to benefit from those gains thanks to a forty year old executive order that had been signed in 1933 by then President Franklin Roosevelt.
Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102 criminalized the private ownership of more than $100 worth of gold in the United States. Roosevelt also gave Americans just 25 days to turn over their gold to the Federal Reserve… or else face up to ten years in prison.
Naturally, plenty of Americans were outraged, and a number of lawsuits were filed claiming that Roosevelt’s order was unconstitutional.
Roosevelt was rightfully worried that the Supreme Court would overturn his order. And at a certain point he considered packing the court, i.e. appointing several sympathetic judges to the Supreme Court to ensure his victory. He also considered issuing another order which would make it illegal to sue the federal government.
Fortunately for Roosevelt, however, he didn’t have to implement any of those actions; the Supreme Court very narrowly ruled in his favor, and his Executive Order stood as law of the land for four decades… until Senator Fulbright’s no-name law was finally passed on August 14, 1974.
It went into effect the following year, and Americans were suddenly free once again to exchange their rapidly-depreciating US dollars for gold.
Unsurprisingly, gold prices started rising dramatically in the second half of the decade… from about $180 in 1975, to a whopping $850 in January 1980.
And the declining dollar was just one reason for gold’s popularity; remember, the United States suffered a deluge of troubles during the 1970s and early 1980s.
The world found out that the US President was a criminal during the Watergate scandal of 1974. Then there was the humiliating US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, complete with a helicopter evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon.
Iran seized 52 US citizens in 1979 and held them hostage for more than a year. Inflation raged, peaking at 13.6%. The economy stagnated and fell into recession. Troubles in the Middle East (including conflict with Israel) led to energy shortages and rising fuel prices.
Civil unrest and ‘mostly peaceful’ protests were a constant problem in the 70s and 80s. Meanwhile, criminals rampaged across American cities, and the murder rate soared. Major cities like New York, LA, and Chicago became synonymous with violent crime.
The world stopped making sense. And gold became a safe haven from that chaos.
There’s an old saying (originally a Danish proverb) suggesting that if history doesn’t repeat, it certainly rhymes. And I think it’s obvious that we’re facing many of the same challenges today.
There are major problems in the Middle East. Energy is becoming scarce (especially in Europe). The US military suffered a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. Civil unrest and crime rates are totally unacceptable. Inflation continues to rage. And the President, a.k.a. “the Big Guy” appears suspicious A.F.
Just like in the 1970s, gold represents a safe haven from this chaos. And even though it’s hovering at a near-record around $2,000, I think that there is still a long way for gold to rise.
The US national debt is now $33.7 trillion; that’s up more than HALF A TRILLION just in the month of October.
The people in charge have absolutely zero fiscal restraint. Zero responsibility. Zero sense of how destructive their actions are. They spend money and go deeper into debt as if there will never be any consequences, ever, until the end of time. They’re disgustingly ignorant, and dangerous.
The truth is that there are serious consequences to all of this debt. And we don’t have to guess what they are.
The Congressional Budget Office is already projecting that, by 2031, the US government will spend 100% of its tax revenue just on mandatory entitlements (like Social Security) and interest on the debt.
This means that, after 2031, the funding for literally everything else in government– from the US military to the light bill at the White House– will have to be funded by more debt.
That’s only 7 years away.
Then, two years later in 2033, Social Security’s primary trust fund will run out of money; this will cost the government an additional $1 trillion in additional spending each year to keep the program running. Naturally they’ll have to borrow that money too.
Eventually the national debt will become so large that simply paying interest each year will consume more than 100% of tax revenue.
The Federal Reserve will most likely attempt to bail out government by creating trillions upon trillions of dollars. But just as we saw over the past few years, such actions will most likely result in much higher inflation.
Disgusted with their financial circumstance, voters across America will likely turn to Socialist politicians who blame all the problems on the evils of capitalism, rather than their own incompetence. And with a majority of leftists running the country, they’ll only make things worse.
I also anticipate more conflict in the world, thanks in large part to the continued decline of America’s stature and reputation for strength.
It’s also quite likely that the US dollar could lose its royal status as the world’s dominant reserve currency by the end of the decade.
I don’t necessarily believe that the dollar will simply vanish from global trade. But it won’t be “King” dollar anymore. Perhaps more like “Earl” or “Viscount” dollar, alongside other currencies and exchange mechanisms– including gold.
In fact we could easily see central banks around the world ditching their US dollars and loading up on gold as part of a new, de-dollarized global financial system.
This could potentially trigger trillions of dollars worth of capital inflows into the gold market, causing a surge in gold prices.
And these are just some of the reasons why gold could still have a long, long way to rise from here.
Bear in mind that I’m not thinking about the gold price next month, or even next year. I think long-term, and my views on gold are based on trends that will likely continue to unfold over the next decade.
I’m not a ‘gold bug’. I don’t have a fanatical view about anything other than my own children. I’m not a gold speculator either.
But it’s obvious to me that in an upside down world where there are such obvious long-term threats to the US dollar, it makes sense to look for real stores of value.
And that’s why $2,000 gold could just be the beginning of a much bigger story.
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.
