(The Economic Collapse Blog)—As we approach what is likely to be the most chaotic presidential election in U.S. history, trouble signs are starting to erupt for the U.S. economy. In fact, CNN is actually admitting that “the long-predicted storm clouds in the economy may actually be forming”. I can’t remember the last time that I saw a CNN article with a headline like that. But at this point, it is becoming extremely difficult for the mainstream media to avoid the truth.
Inflation is getting worse at the same time that many key sectors of our economy are slowing down. If you thought that the last couple of years were rough for the economy, just wait until you see what is coming next. Tremendous turmoil is on the horizon, and the American people are becoming increasingly emotional about our rapidly growing economic problems.
On Wednesday, we learned that prices jumped even more than expected during the month of March…
Inflation jumped in March as prices for consumer staples such as gasoline edged higher and those for housing remained stubbornly high, suggesting inflation may be a bit stickier than it seemed just a few months ago, economists said.
The consumer price index, a key inflation gauge, rose 3.5% in March from a year ago, the U.S. Labor Department reported Wednesday. That’s up from 3.2% in February.
Lots of pundits on television are telling us that this is really bad news for Joe Biden.
But if prices were only rising at a 3.5 percent annual rate, that would be outstanding news.
In fact, if prices were only rising at a 3.5 percent annual rate I would not be concerned about inflation at all.
Of course by now everyone realizes that the way inflation is calculated has been changed repeatedly over the years and so the numbers that the government gives us are essentially meaningless at this point.
In order to get a realistic idea of how much prices are rising, we need to look at specific categories.
For example, Fox Business is reporting that the cost of energy “is up 36.9% from where it was in Jan. 2021″…
Tuesday’s inflation numbers punctuate what has been a dreadful three years for energy consumers. The overall cost of energy in March is up 36.9% from where it was in Jan. 2021, according to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Of course energy prices are going to go a lot higher than they are right now. Just wait until Iran and Israel start lobbing missiles at one another.
Housing has become insanely expensive as well. In fact, the average monthly mortgage payment on a newly purchased home has approximately doubled since Joe Biden entered the White House.
So how in the world can they possibly tell us with a straight face that inflation is in the low single digits if that is the case?
Home insurance rates are going into the stratosphere as well. One 71-year-old retiree in South Dakota says that his home insurance payment went up by 110 percent in just one year…
Ken Brown is worried he is going to be forced out of his house if his home insurance premium continues to go up.
The 71-year-old retiree who lives near Rapid City, South Dakota, has seen his annual cover with American Family skyrocket almost 110 percent in the last year – from $1,665 to $3,490.
Ken is on a fixed retirement income, while his wife Valeria, 68, is still working to help cover the insurance bill – and a whole host of other rising costs.
Let’s be honest with ourselves.
The truth is that we are in the midst of the worst inflation crisis that any of us have ever seen.
Don’t let them gaslight you.
The price of food is also going nuts. At one location in California, a 40 piece order of Chicken McNuggets and two orders of large fries will now set you back more than 25 dollars…
A viral social media video about a $25 McDonald’s “deal” recently sparked an online debate about California’s minimum-wage increase.
A TikTok user who posts videos under the username @shannon_montipaya shared the video on March 27. She was in the drive-thru of a Southern California McDonald’s location when she saw a sign for a 40-piece Chicken McNugget meal deal, which also included two large orders of fries.
The price of the meal bundle was $25.39 — including sales tax, it would come to roughly $27. In the video, the social media user lamented that the meal didn’t even include a drink.
“OK, so it’s $25.39 for 40-piece nuggets and two large fries,” she said. “You couldn’t even throw in the Sprite?
With everything that is going on, I can certainly understand why Americans are getting so emotional about inflation.
Recently, one TikTok user racked up 5 million views when he posted a rant in which he boldly declared that “I cannot afford to live”…
Last week, a TikTok user posted an angry rant about the cost of living that’s since been viewed 5 million times on the platform, with tens of thousands of comments and shares.
“I make over three times the federal minimum wage and I cannot afford to live,” he shouts into the camera. “It is embarrassing to come out and say that it is a struggle to survive right now but I know so many people are struggling.”
Later, he concludes: “The American Dream is dead.”
Many of you can identify with that.
I have heard from so many readers that are deeply struggling in this economy.
Unfortunately, there are signs that things are about to get even worse.
For example, small business optimism in the United States has dropped to the lowest level in 11 years…
The failure of Bidenomics has crushed confidence among US small businesses to the lowest level in more than a decade, as the future path of inflation remains a significant concern. Readers must remember small businesses are vital to the economy, contributing 44% of the country’s economic activity and creating two-thirds of net new jobs.
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) reported Tuesday that its small-business optimism index declined .9 points to 88.5, the lowest level since the second half of 2012 – or about when the US economy climbed out of the worst financial crisis ever.
And I was deeply saddened to learn that 99 Cents Only is moving toward liquidating all of their stores…
99 Cents Only shops will begin shuttering its hundreds of locations on Friday as the company moves toward total liquidation.
“99 Cents Only Stores, together with its financial and legal advisors, engaged in an extensive analysis of all available and credible alternatives to identify a solution that would allow the business to continue,” the company said in a press release.
“Following months of actively pursuing these alternatives, the company ultimately determined that an orderly wind-down was necessary and the best way to maximize the value of 99 Cents Only Stores’ assets.”
Prior to the announcement, 99 Cents Only was operating 371 stores in the United States.
Of course we also recently learned that Dollar Tree and Family Dollar will be closing about 1000 stores.
All over America, stores that were once thriving will soon be boarded up.
This is what the future of our economy looks like, and many Americans are preparing for rougher times by purchasing large quantities of gold…
Gold has turned into money for Costco, where yellow metal sales begun last year have turned into a cash cow for the big-box retailer.
In fact, sales are so brisk that analysts at Wells Fargo expect revenue “may now be running at” $100 million to $200 million a month, a rapid acceleration since bullion hit the warehouse club late in the summer of 2023.
Just like me, so many of you can feel what is coming.
A tipping point has arrived, and the outlook for the months ahead is very bleak.
The U.S. economy is going off the rails, and the worse things get the more frustrated the American people are going to become.
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.
