Trillions of dollars in market wealth has already been wiped out, and investors are bracing for a chaotic second half of 2022. We truly haven’t seen anything like this since the financial crisis of 2008. The early months of 2020 were volatile due to the eruption of the COVID pandemic, but the Federal Reserve quickly rushed to the rescue.
The Fed poured trillions of dollars into the system, and that spurred a rally that was absolutely breathtaking. But this time around the Fed isn’t going to be riding to the rescue any time soon. The Fed is committed to raising interest rates in a desperate attempt to get inflation under control, and the size of the Fed balance sheet is now being reduced. So there will be no artificial life support for the financial markets for the foreseeable future, and that is really bad news for those that are seeing their portfolios get absolutely monkey-hammered.
Things have been particularly brutal for crypto investors.
Last November, the total global market cap for all cryptocurrencies peaked out at about 3.1 trillion dollars.
Over the weekend, the total global market cap for all cryptocurrencies actually dipped below 850 billion dollars…
The crypto market suffered one of its most dramatic selloffs in years this week as the prices of top cryptocurrencies declined as much as 35% week-over-week as fears of a broad economic recession intensified.
On Saturday, the total global market cap of cryptocurrencies sank below $850 billion as top tokens tumbled.
Poof. More than two-thirds of all “crypto wealth” is already gone.
CNBC is using the word “carnage” to describe what we have been witnessing in the crypto industry, and I think that fits the nightmare that is currently unfolding quite well…
Carnage in the crypto market won’t let up, as token prices plummet, companies lay off employees in waves, and some of the most popular names in the industry go belly up. The chaos has spooked investors, erasing more than $2 trillion in value in a matter of months — and wiping out the life savings of retail traders who bet big on crypto projects billed as safe investments.
It has been estimated that 16 percent of all U.S. adults either own or have owned a cryptocurrency. So a whole lot of people out there are really hurting right now.
Last November, the price of Bitcoin peaked at $68,789.63. As I write this article, it is sitting at $20,170.10.
Last November, the price of Ethereum peaked at $4,891.70. As I write this article, it is sitting at $1,093.40.
I feel really sorry for those that decided to pour their money into cryptos near the peak. Stock investors are also getting pummeled these days. In fact, U.S. retirement accounts have already declined in value by almost three trillion dollars thanks to rapidly falling stock prices…
The U.S. stock market rout that has put U.S. equities in a bear market isn’t just reducing the net worth of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It’s also taking a toll on Americans’ retirement savings, wiping out trillions of dollars in value.
The selloff has erased nearly $3 trillion from U.S. retirement accounts, according to Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. By her calculations, 401(k) plan participants have lost about $1.4 trillion from their accounts since the end of 2021. People with IRAs — most of which are 401(k) rollovers — have lost $2 trillion this year.
Stocks have just kept falling and falling and falling.
In fact, the S&P 500 has fallen for 10 of the last 11 weeks…
The S&P 500 posted its 10th down week in the last 11, and is now well into a bear market. On Thursday, all 11 of its sectors closed more than 10% below their recent highs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 30,000 for the first time since January 2021 this past week.
Cryptos have already collapsed, but stocks theoretically still have a ton of room to keep falling. There are some that are speculating about what will happen if the Dow drops all the way to 20,000, and that would definitely be a crash of historic proportions. Of course the housing market is much larger than the stock market, and that is starting to implode too.
If you can believe it, the total value of the U.S. housing market was valued at 43.4 trillion dollars earlier this year. Unfortunately, mortgage rates are absolutely skyrocketing and that is going to change everything. According to Redfin, home sellers are already dropping their prices at a rate that we have never seen before…
The highest share of sellers on record dropped their list price during the four weeks ending June 12 as mortgage rates shot up to levels not seen since 2008, dwindling the pool of home shoppers.
It is being reported that in some areas of the country home prices have already been reduced by as much as 20 percent. And this implosion is likely to accelerate as the Federal Reserve just pushes interest rates higher and higher and higher.
How long will it be before millions upon millions of U.S. homeowners are underwater on their mortgages just like we saw in 2008? As I warned last week, those that do not learn from history are likely to end up repeating it.
The U.S. economy was almost certainly heading into a recession anyway, but now a crypto crash, a stock market crash and a housing crash all at the same time will accelerate matters greatly.
According to one recent survey, 60 percent of corporate executives expect a recession to begin “in the next 12 to 18 months”…
More than 60% of executives expect a recession in the next 12 to 18 months, according to a survey of CEOs and other C-suite executives conducted by the Conference Board, a business research firm. That’s a stunning increase from the end of 2021, when just 22% of executives forecast a recession.
Sadly, we aren’t going to have to wait that long. As I detailed last week, there are lots of numbers that indicate that a major economic downturn is already here.
It is time to batten down the hatches, because a “perfect storm” has arrived. Global events are accelerating at a frightening pace, and the months ahead are not going to be pleasant.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to ask Jesus to be your Lord and Savior today.
Photo by Ilya Chunin on Unsplash. Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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.
