The banking turmoil following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has significantly affected the American public’s confidence in banks and other financial institutions, according to a new poll.
The poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that just 10 percent of U.S. adults say they have high confidence in the nation’s banks and financial institutions, down from 22 percent in 2020.
A total of 57 percent said they have “only some” confidence in banks, while 30 percent have “hardly any.”
The nationwide poll of 1,081 adults was conducted from March 16–20, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Along with declining confidence in banks, the poll found that fewer Americans have high confidence in any branch of the U.S. government.
In addition, roughly half of the public anticipates the national economy and the state of the country will decline over the next year, with Republicans more than twice as likely as Democrats to expect the situation to worsen.
The poll also found that a majority of Americans believe the government is not doing enough to regulate banks and other financial institutions: 56 percent said the government isn’t doing enough to regulate the industry, while 27 percent said it’s doing “about the right amount,” and 15 percent said it’s regulating “too much.”
Biden, Fed Say Banking System Stable
The latest findings come as both the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve have sought to quell fears over possible wide-reaching bank instability.
“Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe. Your deposits will be there when you need them,” Biden said at a White House press conference on March 13.
His comments were reiterated by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Wednesday after the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) voted unanimously to raise interest rates by 25 points.
While speaking after the FOMC meeting, Powell told reporters that the U.S. banking system remains “sound and resilient” with “strong capital and liquidity.”
“We will continue to closely monitor conditions in the banking system and are prepared to use all of our tools as needed to keep it safe and sound,” Powell told reporters. “We are committed to learning the lessons from this episode, and to work to prevent episodes from events like this from happening again.”
However, fears are still rife of possible contagion following the collapse of SVB, the nation’s sixteenth-biggest bank, on March 10. The bank’s failure was prompted by a combination of rising interest rates, a dry-up in venture capital, and that a high percentage of customer deposits were invested in Treasury bonds, which are highly sensitive to interest rates.
‘Banking Crisis of the Rich’
Two days later, regulators closed New York-based Signature Bank, which had recently made headlines over its alleged involvement in the now-bankrupt crypto firm FTX.
Flagstar Bank, a subsidiary of New York Community Bancorp, will buy a significant portion of the failed bank’s deposits under a $2.7 billion deal with U.S. regulators announced on March 19.
Shortly after, Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse—which is among 30 financial institutions known as globally systemically important banks— was acquired by rival UBS in a $3.23 billion deal meant to stave off a collapse and broader market chaos.
However, some industry experts have framed the current turmoil as a “banking crisis of the rich” as opposed to the general population.
Speaking at a Bloomberg conference in London on Wednesday, Davide Serra, founder and CEO of global asset manager Algebris, said, “In this banking crisis, in a way, I would characterize it as a banking crisis of the rich. If you think about it SVB was the bank of all the tech guys, startups, and venture capitalists, the average deposit was more than $10 million—that’s not a little bank.”
Serra also noted that First Republic was the bank of “hedge fund managers and private equity guys,” while Credit Suisse was the bank of the “global rich.”
“This time assets are fine, it’s a liability problem, and it’s in banks that are not normal banks … so in a way, it’s institution run, very concentrated clientele, albeit billionaires, and they all panicked” and moved their deposits out of the banks, he said. “But that’s not what’s going to happen to the rest of the banking system.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
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.
