If you want to believe that propaganda that is coming from the Biden administration, you probably won’t want to read this article. Joe Biden insists that “Bidenomics” is working and that a wonderful new era of peace and prosperity is just around the corner. Meanwhile, inflation is out of control, homelessness is rising to very frightening levels, the commercial real estate market is imploding, and large companies are conducting mass layoffs all over America. In fact, tech companies have already laid off more workers in 2023 than they did all of last year…
More than 219,000 global technology-sector employees have been laid off since the start of 2023, according to data compiled by the website Layoffs.fyi.
That number has gone up more than eightfold since mid-January, the website noted.
The data show that 2023 has easily surpassed 2022 for global tech redundancies, with 869 tech companies laying off 219,809 employees since the start of the year. Last year, 1,024 tech companies laid off a total of 154,336 employees, according to Layoffs.fyi.
For some of our largest tech companies, one round of layoffs was simply not enough.
For example, after laying off 10,000 workers earlier this year, Microsoft has decided that another round of layoffs has now become necessary…
Microsoft confirmed Monday that it’s eliminating additional jobs, a week after the start of its 2024 fiscal year.
The cuts are in addition to the downsizing announced in January that resulted in 10,000 layoffs. The software maker also disclosed a small number of cuts this time last year.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has already conducted three rounds of layoffs so far in 2023…
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. (META) also made its latest round of layoffs in late May, according to reports, marking the tech giant’s third set of cuts this year. Meta declined to comment in response to a request from MarketWatch for confirmation of the latest layoffs. The company’s second round of layoffs in April cut technical positions, according to LinkedIn posts. Meta is in the midst of cutting 21,000 jobs in 2023 as part of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described as a “year of efficiency” for the company.
What we are witnessing is complete and utter carnage, but the mainstream media is not making a big deal out of all this.
After all, it wouldn’t be good to make Joe Biden look bad, would it?
But no matter what sort of positive spin the Biden administration tries to put on things, the layoffs just keep on coming. For example, on Friday we learned that Binance has decided to give the axe to more than 1,000 highly paid workers…
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has cut jobs just days after it was hit by a wave of executive exits, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.
The layoffs at the world’s biggest crypto exchange come at a time when the industry’s future in the U.S. market is uncertain, with regulators aggressively clamping down on what they deem are illegal activities.
The job cuts were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, which said more than 1,000 people had been let go in recent weeks.
I could go on with example after example.
Goldman Sachs has decided to lay off workers, and so has Wells Fargo. And now that Tucker Carlson is gone, Fox News has determined that this is the perfect time to conduct “company-wide” layoffs…
Fox News is reportedly beginning “company-wide” layoffs, including of the remaining former employees of Tucker Carlson.
The development was reported on Friday by journalist and Carlson biographer Chadwick Moore, who published a screenshot of an email informing employees of the impending action.
The email ordered the recipients to turn in all company equipment and their ID badges at 9 p.m. after the conclusion of the show they were working on.
It is beginning to look a lot like 2008, and there will be so many heartbreaking stories in the months ahead.
Bankruptcies are surging, and vast numbers of businesses are starting to fail. In San Francisco, Anchor Brewery will be ceasing operations after 127 years in business, and so all of their workers will be losing their jobs…
After 127 years in business, San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company is shutting down.
According to a press release, the brewery has been facing challenging economic factors and declining sales since 2016.
“This was an extremely difficult decision that Anchor reached only after many months of careful evaluation,” Anchor Brewing spokesperson Sam Singer said. “We recognize the importance and historic significance of Anchor to San Francisco and to the craft brewing industry, but the impacts of the pandemic, inflation, especially in San Francisco, and a highly competitive market left the company with no option but to make this sad decision to cease operations.”
But even though they can see what is happening, officials at the Federal Reserve just keep telling us that more interest rate hikes are coming.
They insist that they can dramatically hike interest rates and engineer a “soft landing” for the economy at the same time, but many are skeptical of this claim…
Can the Federal Reserve navigate a narrow path and slay price inflation while steering the economy to a soft landing?
During an interview on CNBC Squawk Box, financial analyst Jim Grant expressed his doubts.
He compared Jerome Powell’s task to Captain Chelsey Sullenberger’s when he was forced to land a US Airways plane on the Hudson River after an inflight emergency, noting Powell is “no Sully.”
Grant went on to explain that even if things don’t look so bad right now, rivets are popping in the economy.
Yes, rivets are definitely popping, and things are only going to get worse in the months ahead.
But just like Joe Biden, officials at the Fed insist that everything is just fine.
In fact, the Federal Reserve says that Taylor Swift is boosting the U.S. economy all by herself.
Apparently her concert tour is so popular that it is greatly energizing the local economy at each stop.
Good for her.
But Taylor Swift is not going to save us from what is coming.
Neither is Joe Biden.
The truth is that the U.S. economy is already starting to come apart at the seams, and the layoffs that we have seen so far are just the tip of the iceberg.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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.
May be the last generation of tech workers in America, although too many have been involved with surveillance snd CENSORSHIP!
Washington state has adopted EQUITY grading now, Jose and Ali to get A’s instead of D’s or E’s and the school systems in Seattle, Vancouver and North Shore have been destroyed by their dropping AP classes and gifted programs in the academic race to the bottom, while simultaneously adopting adult sex education/gender ideology indoctrination programs at the pre–K, and K–8 levels!