(The Economic Collapse Blog)—You have got to admit that 2023 has been a really wild year. Donald Trump has been indicted four times (an all-time record for those that have served in the White House), our proxy war with Russia seems to get even more intense with each passing month, economic turmoil has been a constant theme, and it seems like we have had a major natural disaster somewhere in this country almost every week. In fact, with more than three months to go, we have already set a brand new all-time record for the most billion dollar disasters in a single calendar year…
From storms to wildfires, it’s already been a record catastrophic year for weather and climate disasters across the nation, and we’ve still got nearly four months to go.
As of Monday, the U.S. has endured a whopping 23 separate weather and climate disasters that have each led to at least $1 billion in damage, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday.
That breaks the record of 22 set in 2020.
Some people think that I am exaggerating when I write about the nightmarish disasters that are pummeling our planet one after another.
But I am not exaggerating at all. I am just reporting the facts.
And now we may have another billion dollar disaster to add to the list, because it appears that Hurricane Lee may hit the state of Maine…
Latest projections appear to show that the growing Hurricane Lee is bearing down on Maine and could impact the New England-area in the very early hours of Sunday.
As of Wednesday, the storm has triggered a tropical storm watch in Bermuda, and is now less than 500 miles from the island nation, bringing with it winds of 155 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center.
The storm continues to grow as it moves out of the Caribbean, with its Category 3 winds being felt up to 125 miles from its center and Tropical Storm winds being felt up to 240 miles away, that’s expected to increase to 300 miles by the weekend.
Switching gears, car insurance premiums have risen to a brand new all-time record high, and over the past year the rate of increase has been the fastest since 1976…
Across the United States, the cost of car insurance is up 19% compared to a year ago, according to August’s Consumer Price Index report released on Wednesday. That’s the biggest annual increase since 1976.
But in Florida, where extreme weather episodes are increasingly more prevalent and destructive, the cost is hitting even harder. That’s because insurance companies have to cover more claims as a result of these events, leaving them with higher losses. To compensate, they’re raising rates — or, in some cases, pulling out of states that are prone to extreme weather — according to Insurify, an insurance comparison website.
As I discussed yesterday, the cost of living has become incredibly oppressive.
But they want us to believe that inflation is under control.
No, it is not.
Americans are increasingly turning to debt just to make it from month to month, and this has pushed total credit card debt and total household debt to new record levels…
By some measures, Americans have never been more in the red.
In the second quarter of 2023, total credit card debt surpassed $1 trillion for the first time ever, which helped bring total household debt to $17.06 trillion, also a fresh record, according to the New York Federal Reserve.
Of course our national debt is constantly setting new records.
At this point it exceeds 32 trillion dollars, and we are being warned that interest payments on that debt will reach a staggering 1.4 trillion dollars a year by 2032…
The rapid increase in interest rates over the past year could cause some collateral damage to the U.S. government’s finances, because as interest rates rise, so will the federal government’s borrowing costs on its $32.68 trillion in debt.
Interest payments on the national debt are projected to be the fastest-growing part of the federal budget over the next three decades, according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Thanks to a combination of high inflation, rising interest rates and unrelenting growth in the national debt, interest payments are expected to triple from nearly $475 billion in fiscal year 2022 to a stunning $1.4 trillion in 2032.
Our politicians in Washington are doing such a great job, aren’t they? But even though our federal government is spending so much money, the national homelessness crisis just continues to get even worse.
As I mentioned yesterday, so far this year we have seen the biggest jump in homelessness ever recorded…
The United States has seen the biggest ever spike in homeless people living on the streets – as preliminary figures showed a record 11 percent increase in one year.
There are nearly 600,000 rough sleepers across cities and towns in America, and the jump from 2022 to 2023 so far is the highest since the government started tracking the data in 2007, according to the WSJ.
Places like Oakland and San Francisco in California have become hotbeds for homelessness, as people living on the streets are like ‘drug tourists’ who arrive to have easy access to narcotics.
Meanwhile, the level of violence just continues to go up.
Just check out these new numbers that were just released by the federal government…
The number of school shootings in the U.S. just hit a record high.
Again.
There were 188 shootings with casualties at public and private elementary schools during the 2021-22 school year, according to new federal data. About two-thirds of them caused injuries. Fifty-seven led to deaths.
It’s the second year in a row that the number of shootings with casualties hit an all-time peak in American schools.
Abortion numbers are also setting new records all over the nation.
In fact, some states that border other states that have implemented restrictions on abortion have actually seen the number of abortions double or even triple…
New Mexico, which borders Oklahoma, and Wyoming, which borders three other states, saw the biggest percentage increases, with more than three times as many abortions provided in the first half of 2023 compared to 2020.
Kansas and South Carolina also saw their number of abortions double in that time.
We should all be deeply saddened by what has happened to this country.
In this current environment, literally anything goes, and that is especially true for our politicians.
This week, we learned that a prominent Democratic candidate for the Virginia legislature has been performing sex acts with her husband on the Internet for money…
The Washington Post reported Monday that it had viewed videos in which Gibson urged viewers to pay her and her husband with “tips” for performing certain sexual acts.
Gibson — who offered no new public statements on Tuesday — is in a high-profile contest with Republican David Owen in House District 57, which is based in western Henrico and includes part of Goochland County.
Once upon a time, this would have instantly disqualified someone from ever running for office. But some Democrats are already stepping up to defend her…
But state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, a leading Democratic lawmaker in Virginia, quickly came to her defense, calling on voters to “make this the biggest fundraising day of (Gibson’s) campaign.” Many women voters retweeted Lucas with a link to donate to Gibson’s campaign.
“Anybody who looks at this knows it’s a hit job,” said Amanda Linton, a 45-year-old defense contractor who donated $25 to Gibson’s campaign after reading about the videos. Linton said she plans to donate another $100 to Gibson’s campaign even though she can’t vote for her because she lives outside her district.
Are you kidding me?
This is how far we have fallen.
If she stays in the race, there is a good chance that she could win.
America has become rotten to the core, and if we stay on this path things will not end well for us.
But even though many of us have been sounding the alarm for years, most Americans still do not want to listen.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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.
Car insurance is likely driven by increases in electric vehicles. They are basically totaled for small fender benders. They catch fire and cause massive damage.
Read your Bible. It’s in there.
Can someone please show me on a map exactly WHERE NEW MEXICO BORDERS WITH WYOMING?
a billion dollars ain’t what it used to be. Joe Biden is blowing through 5B a day in debt now.
America was once a great Item,
So many wonders you couldn’t list em,
The progressives came around,
And smashed her to the ground,
All just to build a Beast system.