As the Federal Reserve continues its fastest rate hike cycle since the stagflation crisis of 1980, a couple vital questions linger in the minds of economists everywhere – When is recession going to strike and when will the Fed reverse course on tightening?
The answers to these queries are at the same time simple and complex: First, the recession has already arrived. Second, the Fed is NOT going to reverse course, though they will probably stop tightening for a time.
The technical definition of a recession in the US is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. We already experienced that in 2022, which led the Biden White House and puppet economists within the mainstream media to change the definition. The Federal Reserve also ignored deflationary signals throughout the last year and evidence suggests the central bank along with the Biden Administration even tried to hide the downturn with false employment numbers.
For a few years I have predicted that the establishment would shift into a monetary tightening phase and they would continue with interest rate hikes and balance sheet reductions until markets break and the system destabilizes. That prediction has proven accurate so far, and the evidence shows that elements of a financial black hole have already been created.
The St. Louis Fed has quietly published data indicating that the US is now entering a recession. This admission was posted right before the new year, clearly as a means to avoid wider media attention. The news also comes not long after the Philadelphia Fed revised their 2nd Quarter labor growth numbers, erasing a whopping 1 million jobs from their original estimates.
The implication is that the Fed may have deliberately misreported jobs growth. Why? Because the central bank wants to continue tightening and they need positive numbers in order to justify rate hikes. The question we need to ask ourselves is why, after over a decade of easy money and QE, is the establishment now so insistent on popping the bubble now?
I can’t say exactly why the timing for the crash has been scheduled for 2023 – What I can say is that the crash will be dramatic and, as I noted in December, this event will probably start accelerating in March/April not long after the Fed hits a 5% interest rate.
Does this mean the central bank will pivot back to stimulus measures? No, it does not. I believe the Fed will stop rate hikes at around 5% for a time, but stimulus will not return. Also, a pause in hikes does not mean they will not restart tightening if price inflation remains high. Keep in mind that the Fed’s official inflation target is 2%; wee are a long way from that goal.
Also, the fed has created untold trillions of dollars since the 2008 credit collapse. They conjured over $8 trillion in 2020 and 2021 alone in the name of the covid economic response, all because of pandemic lockdowns that never should have happened in the first place. The amount of dollars floating around the world is epic and inflation is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Case in point – The US housing market has seen at least 10 consecutive months of sales declines as rates increase, yet prices remain extraordinarily high. In fact, nearly every sector of the consumer market is suffocating from high prices, and climbing interest rates have done little to pull them down. The Fed has room to declare a rationale and a mandate for tighter credit for many months to come.
Of course, the Fed created the stagflationary crisis in the first place, and now their “solution” is set to make things even worse. I have held and continue to hold to my theory that the central bank is deliberately triggering an economic crisis. All of their actions support this theory.
The average middle class citizen faces a serious uphill battle going into the new year. The IMF has admitted that at least 30% of the world is about to enter into recession conditions in 2023 and that the scenario will be “tougher” than last year as the US, EU and China see their economies slow. China, the largest exporter/importer in the world, is witnessing a dramatic downturn in exports which suggests that global consumer activity is tumbling.
The IMF, not surprisingly, is still trying to blame covid and the war in Ukraine for economic developments that central banks and corrupt governments are completely responsible for. This kind of disaster does not gestate in the span of a year, or even a couple of years – It can take a decade or more to inflate the massive financial bubble that held markets together up to 2020, and it takes strategic policy planning to pop that bubble in a way that is timed to coincide with a regional war.
Ukraine has NOTHING to do with current economic developments. Not a thing. The stagflation crisis started well before the war was launched. Covid has nothing to do with the crisis either; covid is essentially dead, but the inflation central banks initiated lives on.
The World Bank has followed along with the IMF’s statements and also recently predicted a sharp global economic downturn in 2023 leading to widespread instability. These kinds of announcements from global banks are very similar to those that occurred right before the credit crash of 2008; the banking establishment has been well aware for years that a major decline is in progress, but they only choose to talk about it publicly at the last minute.
So, as job losses skyrocket this year, as stocks tank and as sales plummet, remember this – The people who are responsible for the entire mess are the same people who are going to come to you one day soon and offer to “save” you and your family from strife. They’ll say that all they need is more power and more centralization to stop the bleeding. Don’t trust them and don’t trust their scapegoat narratives. Trust in yourself and in the liberty minded people around you.
Article cross-posted from Alt-Market.
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.
