Thanks Joe Biden! Ever since you entered the White House, economic conditions have taken a major turn for the worse. We have been experiencing the most painful inflation crisis since the Jimmy Carter era, more than 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, the U.S. actually lost 585,000 full-time jobs last month, consumers now owe more than a trillion dollars on their credit cards, the housing bubble has started to burst, and the most dramatic commercial real estate crisis in U.S. history has begun. Needless to say, the American people are fed up. According to a brand new Reuters/Ipsos survey that was just released, a whopping 73 percent of all Americans believe that the economy is in worse condition than it was five years ago…
Americans have soured on Bidenomics, concluding that the U.S. economy is worse now than it was five years ago under former President Donald Trump’s leadership, a recent Reuters/Ipsos survey found.
The overall survey found that Americans view economic issues as some of the most “pressing problems” of the day. Overall, nearly half, 49 percent, of Americans view inflation as the most important issue facing the country. Further, nearly three-quarters of Americans, 73 percent, say the economy is worse off now than it was five years ago, under Trump’s leadership. A majority, 64 percent, also believe the economy is worse off than it was in 2020, when the coronavirus took a grip, forcing businesses to close.
Those are horrible numbers Joe.
So do you actually have a plan to turn things around if you win a second term, or should we just expect more of the same?
You and your family are probably not feeling the pain of inflation because of the millions of dollars in bribes that you have received from foreign officials, but the truth is that “scorching-hot inflation” has been causing “severe financial pressures” for the rest of us…
Scorching-hot inflation has created severe financial pressures for most U.S. households, which are forced to pay more for everyday necessities like food and rent. The burden is disproportionately borne by low-income Americans, whose already-stretched paychecks are heavily affected by price fluctuations.
The latest inflation numbers just came out, and we are being told that the annual rate of inflation has gone up to 3.2 percent.
But if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, the annual rate of inflation would be well into double digits right now.
The cost of living is rising much faster than our paychecks are, and we want you to do something.
It is even becoming a lot more expensive to watch television. In less than two years, the cost of a Disney+ subscription has gone up by 75 percent…
The Disney+ streaming service lost 300,000 subscribers in the United States and Canada in the most recent quarter — an ominous sign for the studio as it continues to pour billions of dollars into new streaming content that is flopping with viewers.
To make matters worse for its fans, the Walt Disney Company is hiking Disney+’s monthly subscription price to $13.99 from $10.99 — a 27 percent increase. Last year, the price rose to $10.99 from $7.99, which means Disney+ subscribers will see their monthly bill climb a total of 75 percent in less than two years.
U.S. households are being squeezed financially like never before, and most of them are just barely scraping by from month to month…
And right now, only 46 percent of Americans say they could cover an unexpected $400 bill without taking on debt.
That’s not to mention that a majority are living paycheck to paycheck.
Credit card debt tops $1 trillion for the first time in U.S. history.
And, in the second quarter of 2023, 36 percent more people drained their retirement accounts to make ends meets, compared to the same period last year, according to Bank of America’s analysis of its clients’ employee benefits programs.
And in recent months large companies all over America have started to conduct mass layoffs. In fact, the number of job cuts in 2023 has already exceeded the total for all of last year.
Sadly, our problems appear to be accelerating. Last week, the number of Americans filing initial claims for unemployment benefits shot up to 248,000. That was an increase of 21,000 from the week before.
Meanwhile, the housing bubble is bursting thanks to the Federal Reserve’s relentless rate hikes.
The average rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage is now hovering around the 7 percent level, and this is keeping millions of potential buyers on the sidelines…
The 7%+ mortgages are doing their magic on the housing market as they keep buyers out of the market, and home sales sagged further in late July and August, from already dismal levels, as indicated by weekly applications for mortgages to purchase a home.
The average interest rate on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming balances jumped to 7.09%, from 6.93% in the prior reporting week, the third highest since January 2002, with only two weeks last November having been marginally higher than this reporting week, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association today.
So what are you going to do Joe? Do you have a way to pull us out of this mess? Of course if you actually had a plan to save the economy you would have implemented it already.
There is no hope for our short-term economic future. Economic activity is steadily slowing down all over the nation, the U.S. consumer is reaching a breaking point, and it appears that a recession is rapidly approaching.
And if we stay on the path that we are currently on, the long-term outlook is far worse.
Bidenomics has been a complete and utter failure, and current economic conditions are starting to eerily resemble what we went through in 2008 and 2009.
It would be wonderful if you would take responsibility for your part in creating this giant mess, but I am sure that you will continue to insist that all of our problems are somebody else’s fault.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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.
