Did you know that 2022 was the WORST year for US Treasuries in American history? The benchmark 10-year Treasury fell nearly 18%, and the 30-year Treasury collapsed over 39%. Many other bonds did even worse.
Even if you go back 250 years, you can’t find a worse year for Treasuries, the foundation of the colossal global bond market. It should forever end the ridiculous—yet pervasive—delusion that Treasuries are “risk-free.”
Many people and almost every financial institution have long thoughtlessly accepted this trope. As a result, bonds in general—and Treasuries in particular—became the store-of-value asset of choice and the de facto savings account for savers and investors worldwide.
Today, the global bond market has grown to be worth more than an estimated $133 trillion as the masses parked their savings there because conventional wisdom said it was the “safe” thing to do. By contrast, all the mined gold in the world is worth about $12.7 trillion, less than 10% of the bond market.
It may be tempting to think the worst is over for bonds—it’s not. As you’ll see, the pain for bondholders is just starting. Although most don’t realize it yet, bonds will become a graveyard for capital. They will no longer be the “go-to” savings vehicle because they will no longer be a reliable store-of-value asset.
I believe the opposite will be true; bonds will become a guaranteed way to lose value. Investors will flee them in droves. The implications of that are profound. If not bonds, where will people, companies, and nation states park their savings?
Much of the value stored in the $133 trillion global bond market will move elsewhere—voluntarily to superior store-of-value assets or involuntarily to bankrupt governments and their cronies as they accelerate the largest wealth transfer in history.
That is the Big Picture reality that most people don’t understand… yet. Until recently, bonds had been in a bull market that lasted more than 40 years. Therefore, it’s not surprising that complacency is ingrained and widespread.
The Big Picture
In the post-WWII era, Treasuries were a stable foundation for the global bond market as the US dollar reigned supreme as the world’s premier reserve currency. However, that foundation has rotted. It is on the path to collapse as the petrodollar system falls apart and a multipolar world order emerges.
In short, the supply of Treasuries is increasing at an accelerating rate while there’s a shrinking number of suckers (i.e., buyers).
The inevitable is imminent as the US government can no longer delay or disguise its impending bankruptcy. The US federal government has the biggest debt in the history of the world. And it’s continuing to grow at a rapid, unstoppable pace.
Today, the US federal debt has gone parabolic and is over $32.5 TRILLION. To put that in perspective, if you earned $1 a second 24/7/365—about $31 million per year—it would take you over 1,029,860 YEARS to pay off the US federal debt. And that’s with the unrealistic assumption that it would stop growing.
Observation #1: The US government can’t repay its debt. Default is inevitable.
This isn’t exactly a revelation, but it’s important to remember. Therefore, the question is not whether the US government will default but how. When faced with a choice, politicians always choose the most expedient option. In this case, that means issuing more debt rather than making tough budget decisions or explicitly defaulting.
Consider the recent debt ceiling farce, which raised the debt ceiling for the 105th time since 1944 to avoid an explicit default.
Observation #2: It will not be an explicit default.
In reality, there is no meaningful limit on the debt and spending. Congress is racing towards ever-increasing spending and debt now that they’ve normalized multitrillion-dollar deficits.
Below is a chart of the Congressional Budget Office’s deficit projections for the next decade. These estimates will almost certainly be too rosy, as they often are.
Even by the CBO’s optimistic projections, the US government will have a cumulative deficit of over $20 TRILLION for the next ten years that will have to be financed by issuing more Treasuries.
Observation #3: The debt will continue to grow at an accelerating pace.
Historically, there has been a vast foreign appetite for Treasuries, but not anymore. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US government has launched its most aggressive sanctions campaign ever. As part of this, the US government seized the Russian central bank’s reserves—the nation’s accumulated savings.
It was a stunning illustration of the political risk associated with the US dollar and Treasuries. It showed that the US government could seize another sovereign country’s reserves at the flip of a switch.
In short, the US dollar—and Treasuries—have become weaponized in a way they had not been before. In addition to being terrible investments, Treasuries are now clearly political tools for Washington to coerce others. There could even soon be “woke sanctions”…
For example, the US government recently threatened to sanction Uganda over its LGBT policies, which means that countries’ domestic policies may make them targets of US sanctions.
The rising political risk attached to Treasuries has made them even less attractive as a store of value. Many countries are undoubtedly wondering if the US government will seize their savings if they run afoul with Washington in even the most trivial ways.
China is one of the largest holders of US Treasuries, and it indeed took note of what is happening. There’s little doubt that this is the reason China continues to dump Treasuries. Beijing has sold about 25% of its Treasuries since 2021, an enormous change in such a short period. Even US allies, like Japan, have cut their Treasury holdings.
There are numerous other examples. The bottom line is that it’s clear the world isn’t hungry for US debt right now, at the moment when supply is exploding higher.
Observation #4: Foreigners are not buying as many Treasuries.
In the bond market, when demand for a bond falls, the interest rate rises to entice buyers and holders.
However, it is worth noting that the amount of federal debt is so extreme that even a return of interest rates to their historical average would mean paying an interest expense that would consume more than half of tax revenues. Interest expense would eclipse Social Security and defense spending and become the largest item in the federal budget.
In short, allowing interest rates to rise high enough to entice natural buyers would bankrupt the US government because of the higher interest costs.
Observation #5: The US government cannot allow interest rates to rise much further.
So, if higher interest rates cannot entice more buyers, who will finance these growing multi-trillion dollar budget deficits? The only entity capable is the Federal Reserve, which buys Treasuries with dollars it creates out of thin air.
Observation #6: The Federal Reserve is the only significant buyer of Treasuries stepping up, which means currency debasement.
Here’s the bottom line. The US government can’t pay off its debt. They won’t explicitly default. They can’t entice a meaningful amount of new Treasury buyers by allowing interest rates to rise much higher. Then what can they do?
Financial repression is their only practical option… and it will devastate bondholders. It could all go down soon… and it won’t be pretty. It will result in an enormous wealth transfer from savers to the parasitical class—politicians, central bankers, and those connected to them.
Countless millions throughout history were wiped out financially—or worse—during periods of profound change because they failed to see the correct Big Picture and take appropriate action. Don’t be one of them.
That’s exactly why I just released an urgent new report with all the details, including what you must do to prepare. It’s called, The Most Dangerous Economic Crisis in 100 Years… the Top 3 Strategies You Need Right Now. Click here to download the PDF now.
Article cross-posted from International Man.
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.
I love it people buy debt with debt … you have a dollar . A reserve NOTE . A note is an instrument of debt . You buy a bond . An instrument of debt . You expect wealth in the form of interest . But what do they give you . Dollars for interest . So you use debt to buy debt to get and they give you more of a debt instrument. The principal is returned to you in dollars . It’s still not wealth but debt.
An you expect to get a head . You expect to make wealth . You think bonds can’t fail .
You are an idiot .
Duncan Adams