Not since the 2008 financial crisis has communist China’s yuan currency been as weak as it is now, which has prompted the People’s Bank of China to issue a warning about a coming dollar dump and yuan buyback.
All major state-run banks in China have been told to prepare for this coming event, which will aim to hike up the failing yuan, which fell 0.9 percent to 7.1340 against the dollar this week – its worst annual decline since 1994.
So far this year, the yuan has lost 11 percent of its value, while the U.S. dollar has reached 20-year highs due to “hawkish” policies from the Federal Reserve. (Related: America’s fiat money system is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme that benefits the rich.)
The amount of dollars that China plans to sell has not yet been decided. What we do know is that the move will primarily involve state banks’ currency reserves, including offshore branches in Hong Kong, New York and London.
US Fed’s currency manipulation triggering a “reverse currency war”
There exists a psychological threshold of 7-per-dollar for the yuan that was recently breached, hence the People’s Bank of China’s new proposition. China’s hope is that it will prop back up the yuan and combat the Fed’s “reverse currency war.”
The People’s Bank of China has consistently imposed a strong bias to its currency reference rate for the purpose of supporting the yuan. The private central bank has also issued verbal warnings against speculating on the yuan, as well as increased the cost of shorting the currency.
Instead of raising benchmark rates, the People’s Bank of China has instead been easing them in an attempt to spark growth amid an economy shattered by Fauci Flu (covid) lockdowns, the Chinese real estate crash, and flailing supply chain conditions.
According to Reuters, some of communist China’s efforts to save the yuan “against an unstoppable dollar” have been successful, but will they ultimately be enough?
“Considering the strength of the dollar, we now expect (the dollar / yuan rate) to trade around 7.40 around October and November,” said SEB in a note.
This is among the more bearish forecasts, along with those of ANZ and Goldman Sachs, which predict a yuan rate of 7.20 per dollar over the next three weeks or so. Citi, meanwhile, is predicting a yuan rate of 7.30 per dollar.
Over the past month, expectations of future volatility priced into one-month yuan options have doubled. This is a sign that investors do not foresee China’s new measures to work as hoped.
The stakes are said to be high, seeing as how China is entering a week-long national holiday. Efforts to stabilize the yuan rate remain critical as the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is set to open its once-in-five-years congress on October 16.
Capital outflows are fueling financial instability across the nation, which is only being exacerbated by the weakening yuan. Foreign investors reportedly cut holdings of Chinese bonds for the seventh straight month in a row in August.
“On the monetary policy front, the weaker yuan, fueled by the wide gap between low Chinese interest rates and rising U.S. rates, makes it harder to ease policy to support China’s faltering economy, the world’s second largest,” reports explain.
“The yield gap between China’s benchmark 10-year government bonds and the U.S. Treasury for the same tenor is hovering at the widest in 15 years.”
According to Ju Wang, head of Greater China FX and rates strategy at BNP Paribas, China’s central bank must learn how to create a balance between being market-oriented and “ensuring financial stability.”
More related news coverage about the U.S.-led reverse currency war can be found at DollarDemise.com.
Sources for this article include:
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.
