(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Warren Buffett did not become a billionaire by being stupid. According to Forbes, Buffett is worth more than 144 billion dollars, and that makes him one of the wealthiest men in the entire world. He made his money in the stock market, and so why is he now pulling money out of the stock market at a feverish pace? Does he anticipate that a crash is coming? Earlier this year, Buffett shocked the investing community when his company sold off half the Apple shares that it was holding…
Warren Buffett, the legendary investor known as the “Oracle of Omaha” (and “Fireball” by his father), is famous for his smart investment choices. So when it was revealed that his company, Berkshire Hathaway, sold half its Apple shares, many investors were puzzled, trying to understand what it meant.
The number of Apple shares that Berkshire Hathaway has dumped is absolutely astounding.
It is being reported that close to 500 million shares were sold during the first and second quarters combined…
In the first quarter of 2024, Berkshire Hathaway sold over 100 million Apple shares, and in the second quarter, they sold an additional 390 million shares.
More recently, Berkshire Hathaway has been selling off Bank of America shares…
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N), opens new tab has trimmed its stake in Bank of America (BAC.N), opens new tab once again, making the total sales since mid-July nearly $7 billion.
The conglomerate, run by one of the world’s most revered investors, disclosed late on Thursday it sold 18.7 million shares of the second-largest U.S. bank between Sept. 3 and Sept. 5 to rake in roughly $760 million.
Buffett’s moves look quite savvy based on what has been happening so far this month. In fact, we just witnessed the worst week for the S&P 500 since March 2023…
The S&P 500 dropped Friday, notching its worst week since March 2023, as investors assessed the fallout from a weak August jobs report and ditched leading technology stocks.
Will this week bring even more pain?
Right now, investors are concerned that the economy may be slowing, and those concerns were bolstered by Friday’s employment report.
As Zero Hedge has noted, that report told us that the U.S. lost a whopping 438,000 full-time jobs last month…
Starting at the top, while the number of employed workers did rise by 168K, looking closer at the composition of this increase is disastrous: that’s because it consisted of an increase of 527K part-time jobs, offset by a 438K plunge in full-time jobs.
This means that since last June, the US has added just over 2 million part-time jobs, and lost over 1.5 million full-time jobs.
If you want a low-paying part-time job, it is still fairly easy to find one. But good paying jobs have been rapidly disappearing. The president of a firm that finds positions for white-collar workers says that the market is in “bad shape” at this moment…
Economists largely agree that the labor market is “cooling,” but one recruiting industry veteran says that is a significant understatement.
Brian Howard is the founder and president of the Howard Group, a boutique search firm located in Overland Park, Kansas, that has been in business for more than 30 years, which companies hire to recruit candidates in an array of white-collar positions.
He said the job market is in “bad shape.”
I would say that “bad shape” is quite an understatement.
Earlier today, I came across an article about a man with an MBA that has been unable to find work even though he has applied for more than 1,500 jobs…
Marcial Quinones, 48, used to have few problems getting jobs in the 1990s without a high school diploma. Now, after what he estimates is over 1,500 applications since the early 2010s, he can’t land any stable job in his field even with an MBA.
Quinones, a father of four who lives in rural eastern Pennsylvania, said he’s struggled to land a long-term job in tech or counseling. He has held part-time positions and built his own inventory software to sell to companies, though he rarely gets interviews, even after redoing his résumé two dozen times.
There are so many people that are looking for work right now. For many Americans, low-paying part-time jobs just won’t suffice because the cost of living just continues to go up.
Thanks to the rising cost of living, the percentage of U.S. households with children that are “food insecure” has risen to a very alarming level…
Now, the inflation crisis under the Biden-Harris administration has intensified this issue even more. It was especially families with children that suffered during Covid-19 as school lunches disappeared and they have been hardest hit again in 2022 and 2023.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, the USDA just published its latest report on the issue, showing that last year, almost 18 percent of households where children lived were food insecure, up from 17.3 percent in 2022 and 12.5 percent in 2021.
In a lot of those households, at least one adult is actually working.
But in many cases there simply is not enough money coming in to even cover the basics.
At this point, working Americans have so little discretionary income to spare that even dollar stores are really struggling…
Dollar Tree stocks plunged to a 9-year low earlier this week, after the chain delivered a disappointing earnings report.
Earlier this year, the company announced it would close 600 Family Dollar stores in 2024, after it struggled to integrate the chain into its business.
Dollar General, which is the biggest dollar store in the US and is located mostly in low-income, rural areas, also reported dismal sales last month and saw its stock plummet.
This is where we are at now.
And since our leaders simply refuse to stop wildly spending money, it is inevitable that the cost of living will just continue to go up.
Our standard of living is being absolutely eviscerated, and it is because of decisions that have been made by those in positions of power.
If our leaders had made different decisions, we could have gotten different results. But now tens of millions of U.S. households are deeply hurting, and much more pain is on the horizon.
Warren Buffett is clearly concerned about the short-term future. He has been dumping hundreds of millions of shares, and it appears that this could end up being one of the best moves of his entire career.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.
