(The Economic Collapse Blog)—How in the world can anybody possibly claim that the U.S. economy is in good shape? Honestly, I don’t see how anyone can make a rational argument that this is the case. Actually, the only people that seem to be trying to claim that the U.S. economy is heading in the right direction are those in the upper tiers of the economic food chain.
At this stage, those in the lower tiers of the economic food chain are very well aware of how much they are suffering. Poverty, homelessness and hunger are rapidly growing all over America right now. But if you still have plenty of money and those around you still have plenty of money, you may be wondering what all of the fuss is about. If you are one of those people, hopefully this article will be a wake up call for you.
Let’s start with the housing market. On Friday, we learned that sales of previously owned homes in December 2023 were 6.2 percent lower than they were in December 2022…
Sales of previously owned homes fell 1% in December compared with November to 3.78 million units on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis, according to the National Association of Realtors. Sales were 6.2% lower than in December 2022, marking the lowest level since August 2010.
For 2023 as a whole, sales of previously owned homes were the lowest that we have seen in 28 years…
Home sales fell to their lowest level in 28 years in 2023 as soaring mortgage rates and red-hot prices dampened buyer demand.
Figures from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) show sales of existing properties slid 19 percent last year to 4.09 million – their lowest level since 1995.
Can anyone out there come up with a way to put a positive spin on those numbers?
I certainly can’t.
Meanwhile, 2023 was a year when Americans got further behind on their credit card bills “in 49 of the 50 states”…
The number of people falling behind on their credit card bills increased in 49 of the 50 states last year, a sobering new report reveals.
As inflation took its toll on household budgets, Americans in their millions became delinquent on credit card debt – with some states much more badly affected than others.
According to analysis by WalletHub, the number of borrowers struggling to keep on track of their credit card bills has risen the fastest in Oregon. Between September 2022 and September 2023, delinquencies in the state soared by 51 percent.
Delinquency rates on all forms of credit have been steadily rising from coast to coast.
This will be an important trend to watch in 2024.
Meanwhile, large layoff announcements continue to pile up at a very frightening pace.
For example, Macy’s just announced that it will be laying off a total of 2,350 workers…
Department store chain Macy’s is planning to lay off about 13% of its corporate staff and close five stores in an effort to trim costs and redirect spending to improve the customer experience.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the news on Thursday, adding that the job cuts will total about 2,350 positions, or about 3.5% of Macy’s overall workforce excluding seasonal hires.
And Wayfair is telling us that somewhere around 1,650 of their workers will soon be hitting the bricks…
Wayfair is cutting 13% of its global workforce as the digital home goods retailer continues its efforts to trim down its structure, cut out layers of management and reduce costs after going “overboard” with corporate hiring during the Covid pandemic, it announced Friday.
The company plans to lay off around 1,650 employees, including 19% of its corporate team, with a focus on people in management and leadership positions, Wayfair said.
I apologize in advance if there are some major layoff announcements that I miss in the days ahead.
We are witnessing such a large tsunami of layoffs now that it is virtually impossible to keep up with them all.
On the west coast, employees of the Los Angeles Times are extremely upset about the “massive” layoffs that are reportedly coming…
With “massive” and “significant” layoffs coming soon, “the L.A. Times Guild announced a one-day walkout from both its L.A. and Washington D.C. offices this Friday,” reports TheWrap.
Staffers are “abstaining from work for the entire day while also staging a rally. It’s the first union work stoppage in the newsroom’s history, according to the union, dating back to when it started printing in 1881.”
This act of suicide is called the “Rally to Save Local Journalism” and will take place Friday at noon.
And earlier today I was stunned to learn that the entire staff of Sports Illustrated is being terminated…
Following through on a warning earlier this month, Authentic Brands Group has revoked Sports Illustrated‘s license to publish due to a missed payment.
As a result of the move, the entire staff of the 70-year-old print and online publication was notified on Friday that their jobs were being eliminated.
“We appreciate the work and efforts of everyone who has contributed to the SI brand and business,” SI operator The Arena Group wrote in a memo to employees that set off outrage on social media.
Once upon a time, Sports Illustrated was a truly great magazine.
Sadly, those days are long gone.
There is so much bad news these days.
At this point the economic outlook is so troubling that even Google is getting ready to conduct yet another round of layoffs…
Google has laid off over a thousand employees across various departments since January 10th. CEO Sundar Pichai’s message is to brace for more cuts.
“We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year,” Pichai told all Google employees on Wednesday in an internal memo that was shared with me. “The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices.”
So far, those “tough choices” have included layoffs and reorganizations in Google’s hardware, ad sales, search, shopping, maps, policy, core engineering, and YouTube teams.
Of course what I have shared with you above is just a small sampling of what is really going on out there. For many more recent layoff announcements, please see my previous article entitled “Alert! Here Is A List Of 20 Large Companies That Have Just Decided To Conduct Mass Layoffs”.
Before I end this article, I wanted to update all of you on the horrifying stock market crash in China.
Zero Hedge is reporting that Chinese stocks just experienced their “worst weekly loss since March 2023″…
Amid ‘snowball derivative liquidations‘, China’s stock market is falling faster than its population.
The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index crashed 6.5% this week – its worst weekly loss since March 2023 with Wednesday seeing the biggest daily loss since Oct 2022 as the index plummeted to key support levels around the Oct 2022 lows…
The phrase “snowball derivative liquidations” really got my attention, and a lot of you know why.
I have been warning about the derivatives bubble in my books for over a decade.
Derivatives are going to become a very hot topic the closer we get to a full-blown implosion of the global financial system.
We are in far more trouble than most people realize.
2024 is going to be such a tumultuous year, but many of the “experts” will continue to insist that everything is “just fine” for as long as they can.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right 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.
