Do you remember the panic that swept through Wall Street in September 2008? Well, a lot of people believe that it is starting to happen again. And once selling starts to spiral out of control, it is going to be incredibly difficult to stop. On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1,276 points. That was the seventh biggest single day decline in history, and on a point basis it was actually larger than anything that we witnessed back in 2008. Investors were bitterly disappointed by the monthly inflation report, because it showed that everything that the Fed has done so far has not worked. It appears to be inevitable that the Fed will continue to raise interest rates in a desperate attempt to get inflation under control, and that has put Wall Street in a very sour mood.
The widespread selling that we saw on Tuesday was more than just a little bit frightening. The Dow just kept plunging throughout the day, and the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq actually performed even worse than the Dow did…
The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid 1,276.37 points, or 3.94%, to close at 31,104.97. The S&P 500 dropped 4.32% to 3,932.69, and the Nasdaq Composite sank 5.16% to end the day at 11,633.57.
Just five stocks in the S&P 500 finished in positive territory. Tech stocks were hit particularly hard, with Facebook-parent Meta skidding 9.4% and chip giant Nvidia shedding 9.5%.
This was the worst day for stocks since the early days of the pandemic. But one bad day does not make a crisis.
Hopefully tomorrow will be better. But when you compare the current behavior of the stock market to how it behaved just prior to the crash of 2008, the similarities are astounding.
If you doubt this, just check out this chart.
It certainly isn’t going to take much to spark a massive rush for the exits. If a bad inflation number can cause the sort of stampede that we witnessed on Tuesday, what would happen if we received some really bad news?
Not that I am downplaying the severity of the inflation report. Consumer prices have now been going up for 27 months in a row, and what is happening to food is especially alarming…
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that prices on all items in the United States increased by 8.3 percent from August of 2021 to August of 2022, with the price of gasoline rising 25.6 percent, the price of electricity rising 15.8 percent and the price of food rising 11.4 percent.
The report indicated that the 11.4 percent year-to-year increase in the price of food was the highest in 43 years.
If you have been to the supermarket lately, you already know that food prices have risen to very painful levels.
And some of our most important staples such as milk, flour and eggs are leading the way…
Americans browsing the supermarket aisle will notice most food items are far more expensive than they were a year ago. Egg prices soared 39.8%, while flour got 23.3% more expensive. Milk rose 17% and the price of bread jumped 16.2%.
Meat and poultry also grew costlier. Chicken prices jumped 16.6%, while meats rose 6.7% and pork increased 6.8%. Fruits and vegetables together are up 9.4%.
The “experts” at the Fed don’t seem to understand that hiking interest rates won’t fix this.
We are in the early stages of a historic global food crisis that is going to be with us for a long time to come. The biggest reason why food prices are increasing so aggressively is because there simply isn’t enough supply.
So the Fed can try to hammer demand as much as it wants, but people are still going to have to buy food and hiking interest rates is not going to help us produce any additional food. If anything, higher rates may put a damper on food production.
This is a totally different environment from the early 1980s, and those that believe that higher rates will tame inflation like they did back then are just being delusional.
But just like we saw back in 2008, higher rates will crush the U.S. housing market and the economy as a whole.
During a recent interview, billionaire John Catsimatidis asked the Federal Reserve to stop raising rates because if we stay on the path that we are on it will “destroy the rest of the country”…
So I call upon the Federal Reserve…If we keep raising interest rates, we’re going to destroy the rest of the country.
Somebody has to stand up and say it doesn’t have to happen. And they’re going to destroy the rest of the country. And there is a recession, it could turn into a depression.
Are you willing to go through an economic depression just to get the inflation rate back down to acceptable levels?
If not, that is too bad, because the Federal Reserve is not accountable to you.
And we are already starting to see signs that higher rates are having a really negative impact on hiring plans…
Based on the latest data from U.S. small businesses (SMBs), the demand for labor has declined again, with nearly two out of every three (63%) putting their hiring on hold because they can’t afford to add staff, and 10% of that group is laying off workers.
This decline is quite significant, as it’s 18% higher than it was in July (at just 45%). Beyond that, the percentage reducing their staff jumped 6% to 10% this month from just 4% in July.
Just like in 2008, vast numbers of Americans will lose their jobs in the months ahead.
Are you sure that your job is secure?
Economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating all around us, and our short-term problems could get a whole lot worse if 100,000 railroad workers decide to initiate a work stoppage on Friday…
President Biden and senior administration officials are working with others in the transportation industry, including truckers, shippers, and air freight, for “contingency plans” if a rail shutdown materializes at the end of the week, a White House official told Bloomberg.
The administration is trying to understand what supply chains could be disrupted the most — and how to utilize other forms of transportation to ensure commodities and consumer goods continue to flow across the country.
More than 100,000 railroad workers could walk off the job on Friday if freight-rail companies and unions don’t reach labor agreements.
Let us hope that such a work stoppage can be avoided.
But even if it can, there is no short-term hope on the horizon.
Our current crop of leaders is the worst in all of U.S. history, and they have us on a path that leads to national economic suicide.
So many of us have been pleading with Fed officials to stop raising rates, because higher rates will absolutely cripple our economy.
Unfortunately, they don’t really care what any of us think, and they have made it quite clear that more extremely foolish rate hikes are dead ahead.
I would encourage you to brace yourself for a full-blown national economic meltdown, because that is precisely where the Fed’s policies will take us.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
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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.
