Economic conditions just keep getting worse. As we prepare to enter 2023, we find ourselves in a high inflation environment at the same time that economic activity is really slowing down. And just like we witnessed in 2008, employers are conducting mass layoffs as a horrifying housing crash sweeps across the nation. Those that have been waiting for the U.S. economy to implode can stop waiting, because an economic implosion has officially arrived. The following are 15 facts that prove that a massive economic meltdown is already happening right now…
- Existing home sales have now fallen for 10 consecutive months.
- Existing home sales are down 35.4 percent over the last 12 months. That is the largest year over year decline in existing home sales since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
- Homebuilder sentiment has now dropped for 12 consecutive months.
- Home construction costs have risen more than 30 percent since the beginning of 2022.
- The number of single-family housing unit permits has fallen for nine months in a row.
- The Empire State Manufacturing Index has plunged “to a reading of negative 11.2 in December”. That figure was way, way below expectations.
- In November, we witnessed the largest decline in retail sales that we have seen all year long.
- Even the biggest names on Wall Street are starting to let workers go. In fact, it is being reported that Goldman Sachs will soon lay off approximately 4,000 employees.
- The Federal Reserve is admitting that the number of actual jobs in the United States has been overstated by over a million.
- U.S. job cuts were 417 percent higher in November than they were during the same month a year ago.
- A recent Wall Street Journal survey found that approximately two-thirds of all Americans expect the economy to get even worse next year.
- A newly released Bloomberg survey has discovered that 70 percent of U.S. economists believe that a recession is coming in 2023.
- Inflation continues to spiral wildly out of control. At this point, a head of lettuce now costs 11 dollars at one grocery store in California.
- Overall, vegetable prices in the United States are more than 80 percent higher than they were at this same time last year.
- Thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living, 63 percent of the U.S. population is now living paycheck to paycheck.
In a desperate attempt to get inflation under control, the Federal Reserve has been dramatically increasing interest rates.
Those interest rate hikes are what has caused the housing market to crash, but Fed officials insist that such short-term pain is necessary in order to tame inflation.
But meanwhile our politicians in Washington are busy creating more inflation by borrowing and spending money at a rate that is absolutely unprecedented in our entire history.
This week, an abominable 1.7 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill is being rammed through Congress, but not a single member of Congress has read it.
The bill is 4,155 pages long, and U.S. Senator Rand Paul just held a press briefing during which he wheeled it out on a trolley…
After the grossly bloated $1.7 trillion Omnibus spending bill advanced in the Senate by a vote of 70-25, GOP Senator Rand Paul held a press briefing during which he wheeled in the “abomination” on a trolley and demanded to know how anyone would be able to read it before the end of the week.
Paul, along with the only other dissenting Senate Republicans Mike Braun, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Rick Scott highlighted how ludicrous the fast tracking of the bill has been.
Unfortunately, this absurd spending bill has broad support on both sides of the aisle, and that just shows how broken Washington has become.
Our system of government has failed time after time, and our politicians continue to spend money on some of the most ridiculous things imaginable.
The following examples that were pulled out of the 1.7 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill were discovered by the Heritage Foundation…
- $1.2 million for “LGBTQIA+ Pride Centers”
- $1.2 million for “services for DACA recipients” (aka helping illegal aliens with taxpayer funds) at San Diego Community College.
- $477k for the Equity Institute in RI to indoctrinate teachers with “antiracism virtual labs.”
- $1 million for Zora’s House in Ohio, a “coworking and community space” for “women and gender-expansive people of color.”
- $3 million for the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York City.
- $3.6 million for a Michelle Obama Trail in Georgia.
- $750k for the for “LGBT and Gender Non-Conforming housing” in Albany, New York.
- $856k for the “LGBT Center” in New York.
And have you noticed that our politicians often prefer to push these types of bills through just before major holidays when hardly anyone is paying attention?
No matter who we send to Washington, the story remains the same.
As long as our politicians are borrowing and spending trillions of dollars that we do not have, Fed officials won’t be able to win their war against inflation.
The Fed can send interest rates into the stratosphere, but inflation will continue to remain high because our politicians insist on showering the nation with giant mountains of cash.
We should all be deeply, deeply offended by what is happening, but most Americans simply do not know enough to care.
But once economic conditions get even worse than they were in 2008 and 2009, the majority of the U.S. population will become extremely angry.
Of course things could have turned out much differently if we had made better decisions during the years leading up to this crisis.
Unfortunately, we have run out of time to change course, and that means that a tremendous amount of pain is ahead for all of us.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “End Times” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written six other books that are available on Amazon.com including “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, 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 copies as gifts to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
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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.
Democrats are already gaslighting the world on how “7.1% inflation” is a good thing.
By this time next year, we’ll all long for the good old das when you could buy a roll of store brand paper towels for $4.00.