It won’t be long before governments around the world, including the one in Washington, self-destruct. Strong words, but anything less would be naïve.
As economist Herbert Stein once said, “If something cannot go on forever, it has a tendency to stop.” Case in point: fiat money political regimes. Interventionist economies of the West are in a fatal downward spiral, comparable to that of the Roman Empire in the second century, burdened with unsustainable debt and the antiprosperity policies of governments, especially the Green New Deal.
In the global Ponzi scheme, thin air and deceit substitute for sound money. As hedge-fund manager Mitch Feierstein wrote in Planet Ponzi, “You don’t solve a Ponzi scheme; you end it.”
Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff made some of their investors a whole lot poorer, but the world didn’t come crashing down as a result.
For that—for a Ponzi scheme that would threaten to bankrupt capitalism across the entire Western world—you need people much smarter than Ponzi or Madoff. You need time, you need energy, you need motivation. In a word, you need Wall Street.
But Wall Street alone doesn’t have the strength to deliver a truly cataclysmic outcome. If your ambition is to create havoc on the largest possible scale, you need access to a balance sheet running into the tens of trillions. You need power. You need prestige. You need a remarkable willingness to deceive. In a word, you need Washington.
As Gary North wrote in a brief review of Feierstein’s book, “The central banks have colluded with the national governments in order to fund huge increases of national debt, beyond what can ever be paid off. In other words, [Feierstein] has described government promises as part of a gigantic international Ponzi scheme.”
In a recent interview, Peter Schiff, who was laughed at when he predicted the economic meltdown of 2007–9, said interest on the federal debt alone “will be about a trillion by the end of this year. By the end of next year [it will reach] two trillion dollars—and that’s if interest rates don’t go up. . . . This is a huge debt bomb that’s going to explode.”
Ultra-high corporate and credit card debt, along with bank insolvency sustains his argument for a coming collapse, the polar opposite of Biden’s economic dream.
Along with this, Reuters notes that the spread between two- and ten-year Treasurys is at the deepest inversion since 1981. Rarely has an inverted yield curve not signaled a recession.
Can Jerome Powell and his advisors steer the economy into a soft landing? Not this time. “The only landing possible is a crash, where everyone on board dies,” Schiff recently tweeted.
Ponzi and Madoff went to jail for their schemes, but how do you prosecute governments for theirs? Prosecution implies being a part of government. And with rare exceptions such as Ron Paul, those who go into government believe gold is a barbarous relic and the Fed is a good thing that just needs a little government tinkering. So, the guilty will go unpunished, unless public outrage misguidedly turns to nonjudicial violence. The rest will be too busy trying to survive and protect those they care about.
The War on Being Human
A study of history, including US monetary history, makes clear that the state is not in the business of securing our liberty. As the previous nine hundred plus days have made clear, any defense of “liberty” would likely be regarded as hate speech. Instead, we are inundated with the feel-good words of diversity, equity, and inclusion along with the fear-driven campaigns of climate change and killer covid. Challenge any of it and you’re demonized—or worse.
But the state can’t do anything significant without monopolizing money, and the Orwellian central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will be the latest installment to control the monetary system. The new FedNow payment system with its emphasis on user convenience is providing the framework and psychological grooming for CBDCs.
The Shadow Superpower
We can stop this from happening. Two states, Florida and Indiana, have effectively banned CBDCs as money in those states. Other states will likely follow. The government will outlaw cash at some point, but those who use it now are casting a vote against CBDCs.
Many people will turn to barter, some using barter metals, and to the shadow economy. If this sounds desperate, consider how the global black market in 2011 was the world’s fastest-growing economy. Sometimes referred to as System D, it features both the usual, small transactions of flea market trades or workers looking for employment in the parking lots of home improvement stores and also larger, international trades. David Obi, a Nigerian, relying on his cell phone and his own initiative, contacted a Chinese firm to have small diesel-powered generators shipped to his home country, where electric power is often scarce: “Like almost all the transactions between Nigerian traders and Chinese manufacturers, it was also sub rosa: under the radar, outside of the view or control of government, part of the unheralded alternative economic universe of System D.”
Friedrich Schneider, research fellow at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, whose expertise is in off-government economies and who coauthored The Shadow Economy, found that System D is growing faster in many countries than the officially recognized gross domestic product. If System D were an independent nation, it would be the second-largest economy in the world.
Conclusion
The future is undecided, but we can help determine the outcome if we take responsibility for it. Wikipedia defines System D as “a manner of responding to challenges that require one to have the ability to think quickly, to adapt, and to improvise when getting a job done.” In this sense success has always depended on System D, with or without government.
The American term for it is life hack, “any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life.” Whatever you call it, it describes a spirit all of humanity needs to adopt if we are to survive the coming collapse of government Ponzi schemes.
About the Author
George Ford is a former mainframe and PC programmer and technology instructor and the author of eight books and welcomes speaking engagements. Article cross-posted from Mises.
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.
