(The Economic Collapse Blog)—If you have enough money, you can buy just about anything. And when you are in a position where you can buy just about anything, you wield an enormous amount of raw power. Today, our world is completely and utterly dominated by those at the very top of the economic pyramid.
Those in the top one percent of the top one percent are pretty much able to do whatever they want, and the rest of us are pretty much powerless to stop them. Unfortunately, the gap between the ultra-wealthy elite and the rest of us just continues to get even larger.
Last year, the total wealth of the world’s millionaires reached a staggering 86.8 trillion dollars…
The world has never had so many rich people and their investments in soaring stock markets have made them wealthier than ever recorded, according to a study published on Wednesday.
The number of “high net worth individuals” (HNWI) — defined as people with liquid assets of at least $1 million — rose by 5.1 percent last year to 22.8 million, according to consulting firm Capgemini.
Their total wealth reached $86.8 trillion in 2023, a 4.7 percent increase from the previous year, according to the annual World Wealth Report.
Meanwhile, 5 billion people have gotten poorer since the start of the pandemic…
Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost 5 billion people globally have become poorer.
How much power do the hundreds of millions of people around the world that are living on less than two dollars a day have compared to the billionaires in the western world that are constantly making headlines?
The truth is that they run the world and the rest of us are just living in it.
Here in the United States, the colossal gap between CEO pay and worker pay got even larger last year…
Bosses have always made more money than workers. But the gap between CEOs and employees is growing.
The median CEO in the S&P 500 was paid 196 times as much as the median employee in 2023, according to an analysis by Equilar and The Associated Press.
That’s up from a ratio of 185 in 2022.
It would be a good thing if the rich were getting richer as long as everyone else was getting richer as well.
But instead, poverty is literally exploding all around us.
In 2020, there were approximately 140 homeless camps in Oakland, California.
Since that time, the city has closed 537 homeless camps, but there are still approximately 1,500 remaining all over the city…
Oakland officials passed a policy in 2020 to regulate homeless encampments when there were about 140 camps. The policy was created to prohibit encampments in specific areas of the city, including proximity to businesses, schools, playgrounds, traffic lanes, bike paths, housing and playgrounds.
Any encampments in those prohibited areas were supposed to be vacated, with the city offering shelter before evacuating the camp.
Since then, the city has closed 537 homeless camps with approximately 1,500 remaining, according to a city report.
I feel so bad for the law-abiding citizens that still live in Oakland. Conditions have become so precarious that one construction company actually “refused to finish its pothole paving job because it got ‘too dangerous’ for its workers”…
Frustrated Oakland residents are in the hole after a construction crew quit and refused to finish its pothole paving job because it got ‘too dangerous’ for its workers – as other businesses flee the Bay Area over the same concerns.
Residents in the Sobrante Park area in East Oakland said they weren’t even notified after the third-party general contractor decided to abandon the project before repaving the streets, leaving large potholes and dangerous loose gravel all over the neighborhood since mid-May.
If you still have a nice home and plenty of money, good for you. But you should understand that you are solidly in the minority at this point.
Of course our politicians care far more about the economic health of the elite than anyone else, because it is the elite that fund their campaigns. So even though just about all the rest of us have seen our standard of living go way down, in recent years there has been an all-out effort to prop up the stock market because that is where the elite have much of their wealth.
Today, the wealthiest 10 percent of all Americans own 93 percent of all the stocks. And the poorest 50 percent of all Americans own just 1 percent of all the stocks.
The stock market wealth that the entire bottom half of the country controls is basically just a rounding error compared to the enormous holdings of the elite. Unfortunately for the elite, it appears that trouble may be brewing for the financial markets…
The US stock market is shrinking, and investors are pulling their money out at a near-record pace as storm clouds gather over the US economy.
That means the titans of Wall Street may have to contend with choppy water as they cruise toward their Nantucket getaways this year.
In fact, Bank of America says that their customers have been pulling large amounts of money out of stocks for five consecutive weeks…
Bank of America analysts said on Tuesday that their clients have now been large net sellers of US stocks for five weeks in a row. Just last week, they sold off $5.7 billion more in stocks than they purchased, the highest outflow since last July.
Bank of America recorded the second largest sell-off of tech stocks in their history last week. And while one week does not a trend make, it does stand in stark contrast with the Magnificent Seven fervor that ensnared Wall Street mere months ago.
Whether it happens sooner or later, it is inevitable that America’s financial idols will come crashing down at some point.
But for most of the country, it feels like the economy has already crashed.
Our cost of living crisis has become exceedingly painful, our entire society is drowning in debt, and poverty and homelessness are exploding all around us.
Just about the only people that are still doing really well are those that are at the very top of the food chain.
When you hear that “the economy is booming”, those are the people they are talking about.
But just like all the rest of us, the elite will not be able to escape the period of tremendous global chaos that is ahead of us.
Like I said, money can buy you just about anything, but it cannot purchase a free pass from the day of reckoning that is rapidly approaching.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.
