I can’t take it anymore. Fake numbers that are released by the government get turned into fake news by the corporate media, and many Americans don’t even realize that they are being conned. Major news outlets all over the country are breathlessly trumpeting the “blockbuster jobs report” as if it is a sign from heaven that good economic times are ahead. We are being told that the U.S. economy added 517,000 jobs last month, but that isn’t true. Sadly, the truth is that the U.S. economy actually lost 2.5 million jobs in January.
Yes, you read that correctly. So how in the world does a loss of 2.5 million jobs become a “gain” of 517,000 jobs? Every month, government bureaucrats apply “adjustments” to the numbers that they believe are appropriate, and at this point their “adjustments” have become so absurd that they have turned the monthly employment report into a total farce.
As I have been documenting on my website for weeks, there has been a tremendous wave of layoffs over the last several months.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Lyft, Twitter, Walmart, McDonald’s, FedEx and countless other large corporations have decided to conduct mass layoffs.
But now the government expects us to believe that the U.S. economy is actually adding jobs at a very brisk pace?
That doesn’t make any sense at all.
Unfortunately, the corporate media is totally buying it. For example, CNBC just posted an article that described the jobs report as “stunningly strong”…
The employment picture started off 2023 on a stunningly strong note, with nonfarm payrolls posting their biggest gain since July 2022.
Nonfarm payrolls increased by 517,000 for January, above the Dow Jones estimate of 187,000 and December’s gain of 260,000, according to a Labor Department report Friday.
And a CNN article has quoted one expert as saying that “the labor market is more like a bullet train”…
“With 517,000 new jobs added in January 2023 and the unemployment rate at 3.4%, this is a blockbuster report demonstrating that the labor market is more like a bullet train,” Becky Frankiewicz, president and chief commercial officer of ManpowerGroup, said Friday.
Really?
After all of the layoffs that we have witnessed in recent months, does she really believe that?
Not to be outdone, Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi boldly declared that any concerns about a coming recession “should be completely dashed by these numbers”…
The January jobs report should “dash” concerns of recession, Moody’s chief economist said Friday, but warned that the numbers may overstate job growth.
“Any concern the economy is in recession or close to a recession should be completely dashed by these numbers,” Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi told CNN’s Matt Egan on Friday, adding that it would take “an awful lot” to send the US economy into a downturn.
Come on man.
You are smarter than that.
The U.S. economy did not add 517,000 jobs last month.
That is the “adjusted” number.
The “unadjusted” number actually shows that the U.S. economy lost 2.5 million jobs last month. The following comes from Bloomberg…
For the establishment survey, the government’s updated seasonal factors may have impacted the headline payrolls figure. On an unadjusted basis, payrolls actually fell by 2.5 million last month.
That is actually what was measured.
But if you brazenly add more than 3 million jobs to the report that simply do not exist, it makes it look like the U.S. economy is doing just great.
Needless to say, Joe Biden was quite eager to take credit for the “spectacular” jobs report, and he also told reporters that he takes no responsibility for the raging inflation crisis that we are currently experiencing…
He replied with an emphatic ‘no’ when asked if he took any accountability for the price rises under his presidency. ‘It was already there when I got here, man.’
‘Remember what the economy was like when I got here? Jobs were hemorrhaging. Inflation was rising. We weren’t manufacturing the damn thing here. We were in real economic difficulty.’
Inflation in January 2021 when Biden took office was 1.4 percent. The latest December figures were 6.5 percent, down from a June 2022 peak of 9 percent.
For the next month, the Biden administration is going to endlessly boast that 517,000 jobs were added to the economy in January, and most Americans will never even know that it is a number that is entirely fictional.
The cold, hard reality of the matter is that economic activity is slowing down all around us, and many people are starting to become quite desperate…
Video out of Austin, Texas, shows desperate people climbing into supermarket dumpsters to retrieve food that may have been discarded due to a widespread power outage.
The shocking footage Thursday from behind an H-E-B grocery store in Southeast Austin featured people having a free-for-all from dumpsters, in what one commenter on Instagram described as a “dystopian hellscape.”
From now on, I really wish that the government would only release the raw, unadjusted employment numbers to the corporate media.
Because there is way too much guesswork that goes into the “adjustments” that the government bureaucrats are coming up with.
But that is never going to happen.
Every month they are just going to continue to tell us that things are better than they really are. At least that will give me something to write about.
If anyone tries to shove the “517,000 jobs” number in your face, please share this article with them.
That figure does not reflect reality in any way.
The raw numbers show that 2.5 million jobs were actually lost last month, and that is absolutely horrible.
And as I continue to warn my readers, incredibly challenging economic times are on the horizon. More layoffs are coming, the housing market is going to continue to crash, and global food shortages are going to continue to intensify.
So don’t let anyone fool you. We really are plunging into a very serious economic downturn, and the months ahead are not going to be pleasant.
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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.
