Editor’s Note: Four years of massive economic challenges spurred by Covid, then by the Biden-Harris regime have set the stage for a tough road ahead. We fully believe and endorse President Donald Trump’s economic plan for America, but let’s not be so naive as to think that it’s going to be a piece of cake. There’s a lot of work to do and a RINO-controlled Congress is trying its best to keep the status quo going.
I note this because invariably there will be those who take the facts listed below and claim that it’s somehow fearmongering. These are facts, and while I don’t necessarily agree with all of Michael Snyder’s conclusions, the facts are indisputable. We can trust President Trump and his team to do what’s best while still acknowledging the massive hole they inherited. With that said, here’s Snyder…
(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Are you better off than you were four years ago? If you are, you should consider yourself to be extremely fortunate, because the vast majority of the population is not. The U.S. economy has been sliding the wrong direction for a very long time, and now our economic momentum in the wrong direction is accelerating. Retail sales are slowing down, the housing market is in a depressed state, mass layoffs are happening all over the nation, stores are closing at a staggering pace, the cost of living has become extremely painful, and debt levels have soared to unprecedented heights. Four years of deteriorating economic conditions have brought us to a breaking point, and now we are witnessing quite a bit of shaking in the financial markets. Even though many in the mainstream media are still trying to deny it, the truth is that we are in an enormous amount of trouble. The following are 17 signs that America’s long economic slide threatens to become an economic avalanche…
#1 The Conference Board’s index of consumer confidence just experienced the largest drop that we have seen since August 2021…
Consumers grew more pessimistic about the economic outlook in February as worries brewed about a slowing economy and rising inflation, the Conference Board reported Tuesday.
The board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down 7 points and below the Dow Jones forecast for 102.3. This was the lowest reading since June 2024 and the largest monthly drop since August 2021.
#2 The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index just fell to the lowest level that we have seen since November 2023…
The University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers on Friday released its consumer sentiment index which dropped from 71.7 in January to 64.7 in February. That’s the lowest reading since November 2023 and was weaker than the preliminary reading of 67.8, which was the consensus expectation among economists polled by Reuters.
#3 Retail sales in the United States just fell “by the most in nearly two years”…
U.S. retail sales dropped by the most in nearly two years in January, likely weighed down by frigid temperatures, wildfires and motor vehicle shortages, suggesting a sharp slowdown in economic growth early in the first quarter.
#4 Walmart is warning us that it will experience a year-over-year drop in quarterly profit for the first time in 3 years…
Shares of Walmart Inc. were hit hard Thursday after the retail behemoth provided a disappointing earnings outlook, including a warning for the first year-over-year decline in quarterly profit in three years.
#5 Last month, sales of previously-owned homes dropped 4.9 percent…
The U.S. housing market continues to weaken, as potential buyers face stubbornly high mortgage rates, elevated prices and limited supply of listings.
Sales of previously owned homes fell 4.9% in January from the prior month to 4.08 million units on a seasonally adjusted, annualized basis, according to the National Association of Realtors. Analysts were expecting a 2.6% decline.
#6 The cost of living is absolutely crushing most Americans. At this stage, almost 70 percent of all single adults “struggle to afford their regular rent or mortgage payments”…
Nearly 70% of single, divorced or separated people struggle to afford their regular rent or mortgage payments, compared to just over half (52%) of married people, according to a recent Redfin-commissioned survey. More than three-quarters (76%) of respondents who live with their partner but aren’t married struggle with housing payments, making them the group most likely to struggle.
#7 Starbucks is telling us that they will be laying off more than 1,000 corporate employees…
Starbucks has announced plans to lay off 1,100 corporate employees as it looks to restructure its operations.
CEO Brian Niccol sent out a letter on Monday revealing employees who have been laid off will be notified on Tuesday.
Niccol stated, “Our intent is to operate more efficiently, increase accountability, reduce complexity, and drive better integration.”
#8 Southwest Airlines is giving the axe to more than 1,700 corporate employees…
Southwest Airlines said Monday that it is cutting about 15% of corporate jobs, or about 1,750 people, a move its CEO called “unprecedented” as the company scrambles to cut costs.
The company said it expects savings from the cuts of $210 million this year and about $300 million in 2026. The layoffs will be mostly done by the end of the second quarter and include some senior leadership roles, CEO Bob Jordan said in a staff note, which was seen by CNBC.
#9 Blue Origin has decided to fire nearly 14,000 workers…
Blue Origin announced layoffs late last week. Almost 14,000 people work at the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, according to Reuters.
#10 Chevron has announced that it will be reducing the size of their workforce by about 15 to 20 percent…
Chevron Corp. Vice Chair Mark Nelson said it will lay off 15-20% of its workers in a bid to “simplify our organizational structure, [execute] faster and more efficiently, and position the company for stronger long-term competitiveness.”
#11 Estée Lauder is telling thousands of employees that it is time to hit the bricks…
Estee Lauder’s job cuts will impact a net of 5,800 to 7,000 roles.
They came as part of an updated “profit recovery and growth plan” and restructuring program that the cosmetics company detailed Feb. 4 along with other measures meant to “further transform the Company’s operating model to fund a return to sales growth and restore a solid double-digit adjusted operating margin over the next few years.”
#12 So many federal workers are being fired that initial claims for unemployment benefits in Washington D.C. went up by 36 percent in just one week…
Since Trump has taken office, nearly 4,000 workers in the city have filed for unemployment insurance as part of a surge that began at the start of the new year, according to Labor Department figures not adjusted for seasonal factors.
In all, just shy of 7,000 claims have been filed in the six weeks of the new year, or about 55% more than in the prior six-week period. Filings rose to 1,780 for the week ending Feb. 8, a 36% increase from the prior week and more than four times around the same period in 2024.
#13 Forever 21 has announced that it will be closing another 200 stores…
A clothing chain that was once a fixture in every mall across America is to close 200 more stores as it prepares for second bankruptcy in five years.
Amid mounting debt, Forever 21’s US operator could file for Chapter 11 protection as soon as next month, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.
#14 Joann Inc. has decided to close all of their stores in the United States…
Joann Inc., which has supplied crafty Americans with art supplies and fabrics for decades, recently announced that it plans to close all of its U.S. stores, just a month after filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
In a statement obtained by Reuters on Sunday, the 82-year-old company announced its plans to sell all assets to a buyer group. Joann executives originally hoped that a buyer would continue its business, but the highest bidder is slated to start going-out-of-business sales at all locations.
#15 Overall, Coresight Research is projecting that an all-time record 15,000 stores will be permanently closed in the United States in 2025.
#16 Household debt in the United States has now crossed the 18 trillion dollar mark…
Americans’ household debt — including credit cards, mortgages, auto loans and student loans — is at a new all-time high of $18.04 trillion, according to a report released Thursday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
#17 More than 26 trillion dollars has been added to the U.S. national debt since the start of 2009, and now we are shelling out more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest payments…
And the punchline is that no matter what Musk does, the USS Titanic is now more or less on autopilot because while a few billions in discretionary spending can be cut, interest on the debt can not be – without a default (it can however be inflated away… and it will be) – and in January, gross interest on the Federal debt hit a record $1.167 trillion in the past twelve months thanks to another $83.6 billion in interest spending.
The meltdown that so many of us warned about is happening right in front of our eyes.
We piled up trillions of dollars in new debt in recent years, and that bought us some time. But now a day of reckoning has arrived.
For those that haven’t figured it out yet, an extreme amount of pain is ahead of us.
You can cheat the laws of economics for a while, but economic reality always catches up with you eventually.
Michael’s blockbuster entitled “Why” 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.
