(The Economic Collapse Blog)—The Biden administration and the corporate media are telling us over and over that the economy is just fine, but the term “silent depression” has been going viral on TikTok. Housing, vehicles, food and just about everything else that we spend money on is far more unaffordable today than it was during the Great Depression of the 1930s. A realtor in Florida named Freddie Smith posted a video on TikTok with some absolutely startling numbers about the cost of living in the United States today, and that is what started the “silent depression” trend…
TikTok user Freddie Smith, a realtor based in Orlando, posted a video in September claiming that the U.S. economy is in what he calls a “Silent Depression.” In the video, which has amassed nearly 800,000 likes, Smith compares the average 2023 salary and basic costs to those of the Great Depression to highlight the growing cost-of-living crisis in the country.
“If you look back to the Great Depression, the house was only three times the average salary. Now, it is eight times the average salary,” Smith said. “The car was 46% of the salary, the car today is 85% of the salary. And here’s the craziest part, the rent was 16% of the average salary, it is now 42% of the average salary.”
Of course he is right on target.
There is a reason why 62 percent of the country is currently living paycheck to paycheck.
The cost of living has become incredibly oppressive for most Americans, and nobody can deny that reality.
@fmsmith319 Great depression vs silent depression
When Whoopi Goldberg declared that “Millennials just need to work harder” during one of her crazed rants, Smith followed up with another video about the rising cost of living…
@fmsmith319 Boomers: “Millennials just need to work harder.”
Many Americans are working as hard as they can, but they just keep falling farther and farther behind.
But we aren’t supposed to talk about what is happening.
We are just supposed to pretend that everything is just wonderful.
And now the corporate media has been putting out lots of articles attempting to debunk Smith’s videos. Here is just one example…
But economists strongly disagree.
“Any notion from TikTok that life was better in 1923 than it is now is divorced from reality,” said Columbia Business School economics professor Brett House.
So what is the truth? Are we in a “silent depression” or not?
Let’s take a look at three key areas.
If honest numbers were being used, they would show that GDP growth has been negative for almost the entire time that Joe Biden has been in the White House. That would indicate that we are at least experiencing a recession.
And if honest numbers were being used, they would show that the unemployment rate in this country is sitting at about 25 percent right now.
Needless to say, that is absolutely horrible. And if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would still be in double digit territory even though it has come down a bit. The official numbers that the government gives us are designed to make us feel good about things. But at this point things are so bad that the charade is falling apart.
It certainly feels like a “silent depression” if you just got laid off from your job. And it certainly feels like a “silent depression” if you cannot pay your bills…
Millions of Americans strapped with student loan debt are still not paying their bills after a three-year payment hiatus ended this fall.
Federal student loan payments restarted at the beginning of October after President Biden declined to extend the pandemic-era pause that first began in March 2020 under his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
However, 40% of the 22 million borrowers who had bills due failed to make a payment as of mid-November, according to a new report published by the Department of Education. That means about 9 million Americans who have payments due are not making them.
And it certainly feels like a “silent depression” if you cannot sell your home…
Home sales in California plunged to the lowest level in 15 years in November, according to the latest data shared by the California Association of Realtors (CAR).
According to a report released on Tuesday, existing single-family home sales were down 7.4 percent last month compared to October and down 5.8 percent from November 2022, totaling 223,940. It was the biggest monthly decline in the past year, which plunged existing home sales in California to the lowest level since the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
And it certainly feels like a “silent depression” if you are living in the streets…
Homelessness shot up by more than 12% this year, reaching 653,104 people. The numbers represent the sharpest increase and largest unhoused population since the federal government began tallying totals in 2007, the U.S. Department of Urban Planning and Development said Friday.
If the economy is in “good shape” why are Americans becoming homeless at the fastest pace ever recorded?
That doesn’t make any sense at all.
But those at the top of the economic food chain simply do not understand what all the fuss is about. Today, Americans age 70 and older now hold more than 30 percent of the nation’s wealth. For the moment, life is good for the elite, and they think that the rest of us just need to work harder.
Of course they shouldn’t be looking down their noses at the rest of us, because hard times are coming for them as well.
The “silent depression” that has already started is hitting those at the bottom of the economic food chain the hardest, but those at the very top will soon be feeling it too.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” 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.
