(Daily Caller)—The Federal Reserve announced it would not change its benchmark federal funds rate on Wednesday, keeping the rate at its highest level since 2001, but did signal plans to cut rates in 2024.
The Fed’s decision not to raise rates keeps the target range between 5.25% and 5.50%, marking the third meeting in a row where the Fed chose to not adjust the rate, according to an announcement from the Federal Reserve following a meeting by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The Fed also released its future projections of the economy and the federal funds rate, with FOMC members projecting rates will be lowered to a median of 4.6% by the end of 2024, indicating three interest rate cuts if the Fed sticks to its typical 0.25% change pattern.
“Recent indicators suggest that growth of economic activity has slowed from its strong pace in the third quarter,” the FOMC statement reads. “Job gains have moderated since earlier in the year but remain strong, and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation has eased over the past year but remains elevated…The Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 5-1/4 to 5-1/2 percent.”
The last rate hike was at the committee’s meeting in July and was the 11th in a series of hikes starting in March 2022 in an effort to combat inflation, which peaked at 9.1% in June 2022.
“The Fed is unlikely to raise their interest rate targets any further in 2024,” Dr. Thomas Hogan, senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the Daily Caller New Foundation. “The question is when they will start cutting rates. The median FOMC projection is that inflation (PCE inflation, not CPI) will fall to 2.5% in 2024 and that the fed funds rate will be cut to 5.1% by the end of 2024. If inflation appears to be coming down, then we should expect their economic projections to show lower projections for inflation and the fed funds rate, indicating they will begin cutting rates sooner than previously expected.”
Inflation decelerated slightly in November, with the consumer price index (CPI) rising 3.1% year-over-year compared to 3.2% in October, far above the Fed’s 2% target. Core CPI, which excludes energy and food, remained even more elevated at 4.0%, following significant recent deflation in the price of gasoline.
The economy showed strong growth in the third quarter of 2023, with gross domestic product rising 5.2% compared to just 2.1% in the second quarter. The U.S. job market continues to slow, with the economy adding 199,000 jobs in November, with around 47,000 of those jobs coming from the return of striking workers in the auto and motion picture and sound industries.
Top investment banks and asset managers are mixed in their forecasts for the U.S. economy in 2024, with strong growth but high inflation and slowing job numbers clouding recession predictions and complicating the Fed’s long-term goal to reduce inflation without triggering a recession.
“But even if the Fed does start cutting rates in 2024, it is unlikely to lower them by much,” Hogan told the DCNF. “The FOMC’s most recent projections show the FOMC keeping interest rates above 5% in 2024 and not getting below 4% until 2026.”
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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.
