Editor’s Commentary: The real estate market is in a state of flux. We recommend physical precious metals as a proper hedge against inflation, but more importantly as a way to protect wealth and retirement. So why would we post an article that argues for renting out property instead of buying precious metals? Because while there is usually more than one way to skin a cat, it makes sense for people with appropriate wealth or retirement to diversify whenever possible. In other words, protect your savings with precious metals and consider advancing your revenue with what Ken McElroy from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times recommends below.
While inflation and skyrocketing rents have been grabbing the headlines, there’s a bigger story that’s going on. With the poor and the middle class being forced to pay more at the grocery store, the gas pump, and to their landlords, they’re lining the pockets of the wealthy. There is a huge wealth transfer occurring right now.
While you may dismiss this as business as usual, right now that business is on steroids. Let’s take a look at what’s happening, and what you can do to safeguard your money.
One of the major ways that wealth is being transferred from the working class is in the labor market. Over the past 20 years, large U.S. companies have been outsourcing jobs at a fast pace. Roughly 4.5 percent of American jobs are outsourced every year. In 2021, when the United States created a record 6.4 million new jobs that were based domestically, it also outsourced about 300,000 jobs to other countries.
While giant corporations can save money this way, paying overseas employees far less, the net result for Americans is increased unemployment.
Outsourcing is especially common in the IT sector. The technology know-how in India and China is comparable to that of the U.S. labor pool, but it’s a lot less expensive to hire workers overseas. India is especially appealing to U.S. employers. The country has been rapidly modernizing in the digital age. The entire population of India is 1.38 billion, and 500 million of those people are online. As a nation, India is likely to remain a competitive talent pool for American companies for years to come.
Meanwhile, Americans are paying a fortune just to fill up their car to get to work. As of this writing, gas prices hit a national average of $5 per gallon and are expected to only move higher, an increase of about $3.07 from a year ago. According to Moody’s analytics, the average U.S. household is spending $160 more per month on gas than a year ago.
While the war in Ukraine has upended operations for companies like Exxon Mobil and Shell Oil, who have exited operations in Russia, they have passed their financial losses onto the customer. In fact, now would be a great time to invest in oil. Shell’s net income rose from $5.8 billion in the first quarter of 2021 to $7.3 billion in the same period of 2022. British Petroleum posted its highest quarterly profit in the first quarter of 2022 at $6.2 billion, compared to $2.6 billion a year ago.
There are many conclusions to draw from this, but what jumps out to me is that when there’s an increase in the cost of doing business, it gets passed on to the customer.
With gas prices rising, it’s expensive to go anywhere.
Meanwhile, for renters, the cost of staying home and doing nothing has also gone up. Rents have soared in pretty much every market.
Places that never would have expected a huge influx of residents, like Boise, Idaho, have seen a massive influx of new residents and rent increases. The average rent in Boise is now $2,085 per month, an increase of 33 percent year over year. In Phoenix, Arizona, it’s the same story: rents have shot up about 30 percent in the past year. If you’re a rental property owner, this is great news. If you’re renting, this is another financial pressure.
We know that wealth is being transferred from the bottom to the top of the economic ladder, so you might be wondering what you can do to ensure that you’ll be able to maintain your own solvency.
As someone who grew up working class, I can tell you that the best possible way to hold on to your money is by investing in real estate. I have been investing in real estate for over 30 years, and I started with nothing. Today I own numerous multifamily rental properties, and the beauty of real estate is that it has always acted as a strong hedge against inflation.
The way this works is that the mortgage on the property has a fixed rate, while the longer you hold your property, the more you can charge your tenants.
For many, the money for a down payment may be out of reach. However, I would urge you to get creative and find a way to make it happen, whether it’s your primary residence or a rental property. One solution that’s been popular with younger homeowners is buying a home with a friend or friends. While it may not be ideal, I believe that this wealth transfer will continue.
One of the basic principles of my friend and mentor Robert Kiyosaki’s book, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” is that the rich don’t work for their money. Unfortunately, the opposite is true for millions: that they’re working hard to stand still. If you’re one of the many who are just getting by, I hope this will spur you into action.
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.
