(Alt-Market)—Maybe the most prominent economic discussion circulating today is the fear that the vast majority of people have been priced out of housing markets for the rest of their lives, regardless of the country they live. Gen Z and even Gen Alpha teens are already planning for a future in which buying a home is impossible. Those that are buying are aiming for cost efficiency and they are buying alone (prioritizing savings and home ownership over marriage).
This is a subject for another article but it represents a reversal in traditional consumer behavior; a sea change that needs to be examined because it reflects greater underlying social and economic struggles.
This struggle is not only happening in the US; all across the western world from Australia to Canada to most of Europe people are facing the worst home price inflation in decades and they’re scrambling to find ways to adapt.
However, just as in physics, there are rules of motion that still apply to markets regardless of government or central bank intervention. What goes up must inevitably come down. There’s been an interesting development in the past year, specifically on the sellers side of the housing equation, and it signals big changes in the near term.
Because of the pandemic, the relocation panic, Covid stimulus and corporate buyers, prices were juiced across the board and the average cost of a home skyrocketed by 50% or more from 2019 to 2024.
A large portion of this buying involved people trying to escape draconian blue state mandates, but there were a lot of speculators trying to play the market and make a quick buck in the expectation that prices would continue rising. Instead, demand has crashed and there are limited buyers to meet the supply.
Google searches for “can’t sell my house” hit an all time high last month surpassing the peak of the crash of 2008. Housing sales have dropped by 32% from 2020 to 2026 while supply has spiked. Realtors have been warning of a massive slowdown, with many sellers refusing to read the room and cut prices as they struggle to find interested buyers.
The reason for the impasse and the frozen market is largely because of debt. In 2008, the crash was caused by easy mortgage loans to people who did not have the income to cover costs attached to ARM mortgages that ratcheted up interest rates over time. Millions of homes were sold to people that didn’t have the income to buy and they defaulted all at once, crashing the system and the derivatives tied to it.
Today, millions of homeowners are locked into ultra-low mortgage rates from previous years. Selling would mean giving up a 3% loan and replacing it with one closer to 6.5%. So they don’t sell.
Beyond that, too many owners bought at the peak of the pandemic rush and the peak of pricing. Now they are stuck trying to sell $250,000 homes for $600,000, and $500,000 homes for over a million dollars. To sell at a steep discount would be essentially the same as accruing even more debt.
The problem is, NO ONE wants to buy a house for $600,000 when they know it’s only going to be worth $250,000 in a few years. In the end, the speculators are left holding the bag and there’s only two options left – Put their excess homes on the rental market, or, cut their prices dramatically and take the loss. I believe this is going to start happening in an accelerated fashion within the next year, even if there is a government or central bank intervention.
Inflationary stimulus is not going to save the housing market this time.
This means considerable losses in home equity and the overall net worth of the population, not to mention a heavy decrease in mortgage loans and credit liquidity. Less credit access means a consumer slowdown. In the case of corporate buyers and banks, a stimulus package might protect them, but not average citizens.
Where there is no liquidity, there is a crash. For now money seems to be moving at a healthy pace, but this is largely in the stock market which is not representative of a stable economy. Stocks are not a leading indicator of crisis; they are always late to the party. By extension, stocks are not going to signal a future crash in housing, nor are they going to pick up on the throttling of buyers taking place right now.
Can this eventual plunge be managed? Yes, to a point, but not at a global level, only at a national level. And, even then it’s not going to change the ultimate outcome, which is concrete losses in liquidity and a spike in debt.
For people waiting to purchase a home this could be good news. Price cuts of 30% to 50% are possible and well overdue. That said, buyers will likely wait out the storm until they think prices have hit bottom. In the meantime there is a danger of post-crash systemic risk to stocks and credit markets. Investors will be looking for a safe haven alternative.
This brings us to a trend that’s been developing over the past couple years that we have not seem since the crash of 2008-2012. That crash coincided with a historic gold and silver surge and the same pattern is surfacing again. During narrow periods of heightened uncertainty, property might no longer represent a secure place for people to park their cash. When markets are in a panic and other hard assets are in decline, precious metals become the go-to investment.
Despite the wild fluctuations in the past couple months, gold is still up 270% since 2019 and is likely to continue climbing even as housing markets fall. The reason is simple: Consumer debt has continued to grow despite central bank interventions and increased interest rates. These measures were supposedly meant to reduce consumer borrowing, but that didn’t happen.
And, as debt grows, precious metal values invariably climb (inflation through stimulus does not need to be present, but it usually is).
US housing debt has shot up 38% since 2019. US consumer credit card debt has climbed 35% since 2019. The US national debt has climbed 71% since 2019. Property used to offer a safe haven for debt- exposed markets, but this is ending. There are very few secure places left in this environment. IF stock markets take hit (as they probably will), precious metals is one of last bastions of security.
There is definitely a correlation trend taking place which seems to echo the 2008-2012 crisis. Every time US housing prices dip or slow sharply, gold and silver prices typically rise.
As noted, it’s not just the US facing a housing market crash. Reports suggest conditions are even worse in Canada, Australia, the UK and most of Europe. In Canada, for example, leftists from the US have gone in search of alternative residency in order to “flee the Trump regime” only to come crawling back in desperation after dealing with unprecedented housing costs.
In the UK, housing for median income earners barely exists, even if they want to rent. In Australia, the median home price is around $700,000 (in the US, the median home price is $415,000). There’s really no escaping this trend unless you want to live in a third world country. And, ironically, those people are not too happy to see westerners moving into their backyards right now.
On top of the inflationary conditions for home buyers, there’s the mass invasion of illegal migrants into the west over the past decade and this has eaten up the rental markets and driven up prices further. Deportations could help alleviate some of the pressure, but this will also act as a catalyst to speed up housing depreciation. For home owners, a substantial loss of equity should be expected.
In the end the pain is necessary; something has to give. There needs to be a debt reconciliation and the economy needs to take its medicine (a deflationary event). Currently, buying has stabilized after years of decline, but we still have a long way to go before demand and supply are balanced.
It’s doubtful that central banks, built entirely on Keynesian interventionism, will allow this to occur without interference. They will eventually step in with more stimulus, which, again, means ever increasing gold and silver values. For now, the smart move for people looking to buy property (or protect their savings) is to rent until this process plays out, and perhaps invest in precious metals in the meantime as a hedge.
Homeowners should also think about investing a portion of savings into precious metals to offset losses caused by plunging property values. The status quo is ripe for an earthquake.
If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch. Learn more about it HERE.
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.
