(The Economic Collapse Blog)—When you look at Joe Biden, you are also getting a visual picture of what is happening to our economy as a whole. Both have been getting artificially propped up for a long time, both are now sick once again, and both are starting to decline very rapidly at this point.
There is lots of speculation that Joe Biden is not going to be able to make it much longer, and of course the exact same thing could be said about the U.S. economy. Sadly, the truth is that the clock won’t stop ticking and time is not on the side of either one of them.
On Wednesday, we learned that Joe Biden has once again tested positive for COVID…
President Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19 following an event Wednesday in Las Vegas, the White House confirmed.
This is the third time the president has tested positive for the virus. And Biden is not alone: the positivity rates for COVID-19 have been increasing recently, as have visits to the emergency department and deaths.
Biden, 81, is vaccinated and boosted and is “experiencing mild symptoms,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
The White House is trying to make it sound like this isn’t a big deal, but Biden certainly didn’t look like he was just “experiencing mild symptoms” when he arrived in Delaware on Wednesday night…
The 81-year-old – whose political future is in jeopardy due to his age – walked very slowly off Air Force One, pausing multiple times.
He then put on a mask on inside the black SUV that carted him off to his beach house in Rehoboth.
Biden also appeared to need some assistance as he slowly nudged himself into the car before the motorcade pulled away.
Of course this is happening at a time when speculation that Biden could drop out of the race has reached a fever pitch. Axios is reporting that some “top Democrats” believe that Biden could make an announcement “as soon as this weekend”…
Several top Democrats privately tell us the rising pressure of party congressional leaders and close friends will persuade President Biden to decide to drop out of the presidential race, as soon as this weekend.
Personally, I don’t know if Biden is ready to throw in the towel quite yet.
But we shall see what happens.
Meanwhile, more bad economic news continues to pour in. For example, we are being told that home eviction filings are way up all over the nation…
Home evictions are on the rise in several major cities nationwide as Americans continue to grapple with the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
Eviction filings over the past year are up more than 15% compared with the period before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 10 cities across the country, according to the Eviction Lab, a research unit at Princeton University. The Eviction Lab tracks 10 states and 34 cities.
However, the problem is noticeably worse in five cities, where the eviction rate is at least 30% higher than it was before the pandemic started.
Whether someone is seeking to rent or buy, housing costs have soared into unprecedented territory.
And this is one of the biggest reasons why so many Americans are so deeply frustrated with the economy right now.
According to Fox Business, the “median monthly housing payment for homebuyers in swing states” has risen 92 percent since the last presidential election…
The cost of buying a house has surged in recent years, as high mortgage rates and rising home prices put ownership out of reach for many Americans.
The problem is even worse for the millions living in key battleground states that could determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
New findings from Redfin show the combination of steep mortgage rates and elevated home prices has pushed the median monthly housing payment for homebuyers in swing states to an all-time high of $2,161 – a 92% increase from the 2020 election.
This is going to have an enormous impact on how people vote, and that is not good news for the Democrats at all.
At the same time, banking industry problems continue to mount and local branches continue to be shut down at a staggering pace…
US banks closed 28 branches across the country in just one week in July.
Wells Fargo, Bank of America and US Bank each closed eight locations in the last week.
The remaining locations were closed by Greenville Fed, Chase and Schaumberg Bank & Trust, who each closed one branch.
Watch the banking industry, because I believe that this will eventually become a huge story during the months ahead.
Retailers are permanently shutting down lots of locations too. In fact Stop & Shop just announced that they will be closing 32 grocery stores…
Stop & Shop is closing 32 underperforming grocery stores across the US northeast as part of the company’s efforts to improve its financial performance.
Shoppers are also being squeezed by higher prices at the grocery store, with food prices experiencing modest upticks last month, according to the newest inflation report.
“Stop & Shop has evaluated its overall store portfolio and made the difficult decision to close underperforming stores to create a healthy base for the future growth of our brand,” said the chain’s president Gordon Reid in a release.
Needless to say, that isn’t even worth comparing to what Walgreens is getting ready to do.
The plan is to shutter more than 2,000 Walgreens locations before it is all over, and that is really bad news for those that have come to depend upon that chain…
Shoppers, it may be time to find a new pharmacy. Walgreens is closing up to a quarter of its 8,600 stores within the United States.
Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth recently explained to the Wall Street Journal on June 27 that the closures would focus on locations that aren’t profitable, too close to each other or stores struggling with theft.
Unfortunately, this is just the beginning, because vast hordes are businesses are likely to go belly up during the coming years.
According to one recent survey, almost half of our small businesses are convinced that they will not survive “the current economic climate, ongoing inflation or another four years of Biden administration policies”…
Nearly half of 80,000 small businesses surveyed say they won’t survive the current economic climate, ongoing inflation or another four years of Biden administration policies, according to the survey conducted by RedBalloon and Public Square.
Their May Freedom Economy Index found that small businesses “remain in survival mode,” with 40% delaying paying bills to manage cash flow and 70 percent putting staffing plans on hold, neither hiring nor reducing staff, “the highest reading … over the past year,” the report states.
We are in far more trouble than most people realize.
I have been documenting the ups and downs of our inevitable economic decline for more than a decade, and now we have reached a stage where that decline is threatening to become an avalanche.
So I would encourage you to brace yourself for very hard times, because it has become clear that this is a story that is not going to end well.
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.
