The “American Dream” is not as affordable as it once was. In fact, tens of millions of Americans are having a really difficult time even affording the basics these days. As you will see below, an increasing number of people are turning to credit cards and high interest short-term loans just to pay for essentials such as food. Thanks to a very long series of exceedingly foolish decisions by our leaders, we are now facing a historic inflation crisis. As a result, the cost of living has been absolutely soaring in recent months. Of course the vast majority of Americans have not also seen their incomes soar, and so our collective standard of living has been steadily diminishing. Unfortunately, this crisis isn’t going to be over any time soon, and so that means that American families are going to be squeezed tighter and tighter as we head into 2023.
When you are barely scraping by from month to month, it can be really tempting to turn to credit cards for relief.
And that is precisely what has been taking place.
This week, we learned that credit card debt surged at the fastest pace in 20 years during the second quarter of this year…
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that credit card debt held by U.S. households surged by 13% on an annualized basis in the second quarter, representing the sharpest climb in over 20 years. A recent study by Wells Fargo found that Americans also rely on credit card rewards to offset everyday expenses.
“When it comes to credit card spending over the past couple of years, we have seen categories shift on where people are spending their money and right now our top categories are grocery and gas,” said Krista Phillips, Wells Fargo executive vice president and head of branded cards and markets.
It is a really bad idea to pile up credit card debt just as the U.S. economy is entering a major downturn.
But most people are not interested in such warnings.
High interest “buy now pay later” loans are even worse, but their popularity is absolutely exploding right now…
But when credit cards are maxed out, some consumers go to BNPL loans as a way to bridge the gap, according to a Harvard study from earlier this year showing that the industry is booming with a particular draw to consumers earning less than $50,000 annually and those with sub-prime credit scores.
According to the New York Times, “buy now pay later” transactions are triple what they were just two years ago, and food purchases are an area of “significant growth” for the industry…
The New York Times reported that $45.9 billion in BNPL transactions were made in the U.S. last year, which is a three-fold increase from 2020. While food only accounted for 6% of those purchases in 2021, stats provided by the companies indicate significant growth in that arena.
When economic conditions turn really sour, those that have gotten deep into this type of debt will be really sorry.
But I can understand why they are doing it.
All of us have to feed our families, and a single cart of food can now cost as much as a really cheap used vehicle did in the old days.
Earlier today, I came across an article on Zero Hedge that really caught my attention…
However, in actuality, inflation and the budgetary issues it is causing in U.S. households, is resulting in “infighting” amongst families, according to the Wall Street Journal.
35 year old Leibel Sternbach, a financial adviser, told the Journal: “If I buy more of my milk before the one in the fridge is empty, there’s going to be hell to pay.” He said his wife double checks the fridge after every shopping trip and tells him of all the things he didn’t need to buy.
The couple spends about $350 per week in groceries – a bill that is up from $220 a year prior. They are cutting back on items like pre-cut vegetables and oven ready meals to try and cut additional costs from their bill.
Millions of other Americans are having similar discussions in their own households.
In the old days, I can remember paying 25 dollars for everything that I needed at the grocery store for an entire week.
And that even included an entire cake.
These days, an entire shopping cart full of food will run you hundreds of dollars.
For years, economic pundits such as Peter Schiff and myself have been warning that nightmarish inflation would be coming.
Now it is here, and Schiff insists that what the Federal Reserve is doing to fight inflation is “not going to work”…
“I don’t know why everybody continues to be surprised when the inflation numbers come out worse than expected. They assume that what the Fed is doing is going to work. It’s not going to work. The people who think it is don’t understand the nature of the problem.”
Schiff believes that in order to defeat inflation we are going to need to see interest rates hiked until they are “higher than the CPI”…
The numbers indicate that Fed can’t win this inflation fight. Part of the solution is positive real interest rates. If you look at all of the Fed tightening cycles since 1973, the central bank has never stopped tightening before the Fed funds rate was higher than the CPI.
If the Fed really did hike interest rates to 8 or 9 percent, that would plunge us into an extremely bitter economic depression.
But that wouldn’t totally solve the inflation crisis either.
There are two fundamental factors that make this crisis different from any other crisis we have faced.
First of all, there is simply way too much money floating around. Our politicians borrowed and spent trillions of dollars that we did not have over the past few years, and the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars that it created out of thin air into the financial system.
Hiking interest rates cannot erase all of that money. Secondly, rising prices are not just being caused by changes in demand.
We have a major global supply problem now, and I believe that it will only get worse in the years ahead.
So the Fed can try to crush demand as much as it wants, but that won’t alter our supply issues.
That will be particularly true for categories that have relatively inelastic demand such as food.
No matter how high interest rates go, people will still need to buy food for their families.
But as global food shortages grow more severe in 2023 and beyond, the total supply of food available is just going to get tighter and tighter.
As a result, I believe that food prices will continue to go up no matter how high the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates.
And every month that prices rise faster than our paychecks do, our standard of living goes down.
This has been happening for quite some time now, and our leaders in Washington should take full responsibility for this.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
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Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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.
