(The Economic Collapse Blog)—According to the absurd numbers that the government feeds us, the unemployment rate is very low and there are lots of jobs available. But if what they are telling us is true, why are so many Americans not able to find work?
As you will see below, some people haven’t been hired even though they have literally applied for hundreds of jobs. There seems to be an enormous disconnect between what is actually happening in the real economy and the economic narrative that they are constantly pushing. By the time you are done reading this article, I think that you will agree with me.
Earlier this week, I received an email from a reader that has not been able to find work after seven months of searching.
He gave me permission to share part of that email with you, and it is certainly quite heartbreaking…
Hi Michael,
I am a long-time reader of theeconomiccollapseblog.com, and your recent article comparing the economy to the movie “Weekend at Bernie’s” really stood out to me.
I’m really trying to figure out WHY it is so hard to find a job.
I was laid off from my job as a Custodial Foreman in September 2023, and have had ZERO results for my countless hours spent searching for comparable work.
I don’t know if you want to use any of this for an article or not, but if you do, please just keep doing what you normally do: Praising Jesus Christ. Without my faith in him I don’t know what I’d do.
When I wake up, I make coffee and turn on the computer and go through the state’s unemployment job search sites they provided me when I was laid off. I have been looking and also applying for jobs DAILY since September 2023. And these are not “rocket science” positions; I’m simply looking for Maintenance or Custodial or Groundskeeper type jobs. You know, “normal working class” type jobs.
But after ~300 applications (And these are all just to the jobs that I not only have experience for but also would actually want to do), I have had 1 interview. One interview in 7 months of applying and sending tailored cover letters with, daily!
If the economy is doing so “great”, why can’t he find employment?
Some of you may be tempted to think that he is just an isolated case.
Well, here is another example of an experienced worker that has applied for approximately 300 jobs without any success…
Royal Siu, who lives in Seattle and is trained as a pharmacist, likes to make his friends guess how many jobs he’s applied to. They’ll often toss out some number around 40, he told BI. He’ll tell them to keep going. Most give up by the time they reach 100. That’s when Siu drops that he’s applied to about 300 jobs. “It’s usually a shock factor to them,” he said.
Siu, who’s trying to use his pharmacy degree to work in other parts of healthcare, is finding it harder to land interviews than in a prior job search. The 28-year-old was getting more phone screenings and first and second interviews in the past. This time, it’s been a couple of months since he had a screening call. So he continues to turn to his network but also doesn’t stop applying.
What in the world is going on here?
I thought that there were “millions” of good jobs just waiting for someone to step into them.
Something definitely does not add up.
Even Americans with advanced degrees from top schools are increasingly finding themselves out of work.
If you doubt this, just check out these numbers…
Even at some top business schools, the number of recently minted M.B.A.s without jobs has roughly doubled from a couple of years ago, when U.S. companies were rushing to hire as many workers as they could, according to data from the schools.
At Harvard Business School, 20% of job-seeking 2023 M.B.A. graduates didn’t have one three months after graduation, up from 8% in 2021. At Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, 18% didn’t, compared with 9% in 2021. About 13% of those at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management didn’t have a job within three months, up from about 5% in 2021.
How are those numbers possible if the unemployment rate is hovering near “historic lows”?
Of course the truth is that we have been sold a lie.
If you do not have a job, you are classified by the U.S. government as either “unemployed” or “not in the labor force”.
In 2008 and 2009, the combined total of those two categories never even reached 90 million. Today, the combined total of those two categories is over 106 million.
The Biden administration says that only 6,429,000 Americans are officially “unemployed”. The other 99,989,000 Americans without a job are considered to be “not in the labor force”.
And more will be lumped into those two categories soon, because large employers all over the nation continue to conduct mass layoffs.
For example, thousands of Tesla workers in California and Texas were just notified that they will be losing their jobs…
The notifications in California and Texas, where the electric vehicle (EV) maker has large presences, came in the form of WARN notices, according to reports.
In California, the planned Tesla headcount reductions will hit approximately 3,300 workers, The San Francisco Standard reported Tuesday.
They will apparently occur at locations in a total of four different cities in the Golden State.
Meanwhile, Texas will see almost 2,700 employees in Austin lose their jobs, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
Sadly, the pace of layoffs is likely to increase during the months ahead, because business activity in the U.S. is declining…
The U.S. economy lost momentum in April, a pair of S&P surveys found, as businesses reported a decline in new orders and reduced employment for the first time since the pandemic.
The flash U.S. manufacturing purchasing managers index slipped to a four-month low of 49.9 in April from 51.9 in March.
The S&P flash U.S. services PMI fell to a five-month low of 50.9 this month from 51.7 in March.
The surveys are the first indicators of each month to give a sense of how the U.S. economy is performing.
Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis just continues to escalate. Shockingly, at one station in California gasoline now costs $7.29 per gallon…
Soaring gas prices have skyrocketed to a whopping $7.29 per gallon in some parts of California – which is above the current the national hourly minimum wage.
While the average price for a gallon of gas varies from state to state – drivers in a certain Silicon Valley town are facing particularly extortionate rates that set them back almost $150 for a full tank.
The Chevron gas station in Menlo Park was exposed on Sunday by a bewildered customer who posted on X that the price per gallon was four cents ‘above the federal hourly minimum wage.’
If you think that this is bad, just wait until the war in the Middle East transforms into the apocalyptic conflict that I believe it will become.
I am entirely convinced that inflation will continue to be a major problem even as economic activity in the U.S. slows down even more.
We are already experiencing “stagflation”. What is eventually coming will be so much worse than that.
Of course the economic pain that we are going through is just one of the factors that is systematically destroying our nation.
A Warning to America: 25 Ways the US is Being Destroyed | Explained in Under 2 Minutes pic.twitter.com/qwmBO8DmMt
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) April 22, 2024
Just about all of our major institutions are crumbling, just about every sector of our society is in the process of melting down, and conditions are rapidly getting worse all around us.
And now we are heading into the most chaotic election season in the entire history of our country.
This is a recipe for disaster, but there is no turning back now.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is 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.
Aaahhhhhh, what if Mr. Snyder followed the news and stayed current??????????
Firstly, the BIDEN REGIME is paying over 500 corporations to lay off American workers and replace them with ILLEGALS —— has no one heard of TYSONS?!
With regard to the pharmacist —- an incredible number of pharmacies have been closed or shut down over the past FOUR years —- both from Opioid lawfare (funded by Soros outfits, of course) and other malevolent factors!
Stay vigilant!!!
KEYWORDS: ARPA, TACRE