(Mises)—Trying to keep up with economic news is exhausting. Tune into the financial news channels or scroll through any number of economic blogs, and you’ll be hit with a fire hose of alarming headlines, scary-looking graphs, and a tone-deaf establishment emphatically declaring that the economy is better than ever.
Debates rage on social media and in the halls of Congress over the most trivial policy details. All while the financial markets swing dramatically with every political antic or geopolitical flare-up. It’s difficult to separate what’s meaningful from the distractions and the outright falsehoods in the daily information deluge. What’s important can get lost.
We live in the most materially wealthy era in human history. The amount of comfort, convenience, and abundance we enjoy today is astonishing when compared to all of human history. And yet young Americans are having a harder time affording the same lifestyle choices—like buying a home and raising a family—that previous generations enjoyed. Something is clearly working in our economy, and something else is clearly not.
And so, if we’re to stay grounded among all the noise of the economic news cycle, it is imperative we take a step back and understand what policies actually lie at the root of our economic problems as well as what’s responsible for all that’s gone right.
In the keynote lecture of the Mises Institute Supporters Summit earlier this month, Dr. Jörg Guido Hülsmann put the monetary system at the center not only of much of our economic pain but of our cultural problems, too.
Our monetary system, Hülsmann explained, is unprecedented in human history. Until recently, the only comparable historical examples were wartime economies fueled by money printing. But since World War II, the federal government has elected to subject us to a perpetual wartime economy.
The result has been eighty years of permanent price inflation. Those politically connected enough to get the newly created money early benefit greatly from this system. But for the rest of us, the adverse effects are hard to understate. For one, perishable goods—notably labor—trade at a discount compared to more durable goods and assets. That’s why it takes longer to build enough wealth on the labor market to afford durable things like houses.
Permanent price inflation also incentivizes debt financing, bringing about what Hülsmann calls a “culture of debt.” The monetary system encourages people to be more shortsighted and reductionist in their economic decisions. Politically, an indebted population is also much easier to control.
Other effects outlined in the speech are that firms become artificially big, the consumption of stuff takes priority over the cultivation and production of resources, the quality of our elites and leaders diminishes, and generosity recedes out of community life.
There are, of course, countless other problems facing us—even in the economic policy sphere. But the destruction of our money is the toxic root of so many of these other issues.
But understanding what’s causing the problems in our economy is only half the battle. We also need a firm grasp of what’s working. Because it’s not all bad. Plenty of wealth is still being created every day. And if we’re ever going to return to a sustainable, growing economy, we need to know how wealth is created.
Earlier this year, Mises Institute senior fellow Shawn Ritenour published an award-winning book on this exact topic, The Economics of Prosperity. In it, Ritenour uses economic theory and history to define the necessary conditions for economic growth. These are the market division of labor, a robust capital structure, and the subsequent improvements in technology. All of this production and investment must be coordinated, making entrepreneurs a necessary component of economic growth. In Ritenour’s words, “Economic progress is the happy consequence of a highly developed division of labor, taking advantage of an increasing capital structure, embodied in technically advanced capital goods, all wisely invested by entrepreneurs.”
Entrepreneurs are uniquely positioned to coordinate the process because, unlike political leaders, they are subjected to the feedback and incentives of the profit and loss system. That allows them to conduct economic calculation—constantly reallocating resources to their most valued uses.
Crucially, the entire process of economic growth relies on the institution of private property. As Ritenour explains, “People can only benefit from the division of labor if they are free to exchange the goods they produce.” Entrepreneurs need ownership over capital and resources to open new lines of production and sell the resulting products.
Finally, Ritenour cites the need for sound money. If entrepreneurs are going to conduct economic calculation, they need a reliable monetary unit. On top of that, none of the above conditions for growth matter unless people are willing to forgo some present consumption to save and invest in production—which is, remember, the exact kind of behavior that permanent price inflation discourages.
These kinds of big-picture considerations are often absent from the economic discourse of the day. That’s good news for the political class and their crony friends, who all benefit from the status quo. But for those of us who want to bring about meaningful change, these are the exact considerations we must work to keep front of mind, day in and day out. The political monetary system is a debilitating, destructive scam that needs to be exposed and abolished. We need a sound monetary system, and we need to recommit to the institution of private property. Don’t let the melodrama of the daily news cycle let you forget that.
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About the Author
Connor O’Keeffe (@ConnorMOKeeffe) produces media and content at the Mises Institute. He has a master’s in economics and a bachelor’s in geology.
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.
Wonderfully nebulous article in the time of FANTASY FINANCE and “financial engineering” — — dark pools, internalization, HFT, rehypothecation and 1,000% invalidated securitization contracts (PSAs)!!!!! Extending the money creation ENTITLEMENT of the super—rich through credit derivatives, carbon permits and cap–and–trade, etc.
Monopoly capitalism MINUS free enterprise AIN’T capitalism, chums!