(Natural News)—Right now, the situation with the markets and the financial system at large might be described comparatively as a terminally ill patient barely breathing on a life support machine while attending doctors tell the family that everything looks on the up and up. In other words, the situation is really ugly behind closed doors – but those doors are about to be swung wide open for the world to both see and experience.
Take the ongoing “bond bloodbath,” as Wolf Richter calls it. Delusions about the Federal Reserve’s fight with inflation are finally giving way as reality sets in that inflation is not going away. It is not transitory like notorious liar Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen kept saying, and there does not really appear to be any way to stop it.
Long-term yields are right at the point of breaking 5 percent – the last time this happened was in 2007, and we all know what happened immediately after. As explained by The Daily Doom, this represents “a huge regime change, after years of the Fed’s QE (quantitative easing) and interest rate repression, and all prior assumptions are out the window.”
Basically, we are entering uncharted territory as the long-term Treasury market wakes up from its delusion about inflation and interest rates normalizing before once again descending. This is simply not going to happen, no matter how much the money masters want to pretend and tell us all is the case.
“Delusion ends hard when the denial breaks up, and the Fed’s financial demolition is accomplishing that destruction now,” writes David Haggith. “If it doesn’t, inflation will do the job for it.”
(Related: Earlier in the month, we warned that the ongoing Treasury bond collapse is shaping up to be the worst in market crash history – and the situation has only worsened since we published that story.)
As the bond markets collapse, so does the housing market, the banks, and eventually everything else
As the Fed continues to tighten the system into a steep recession, there will be another dramatic plunge in the markets to correct what Haggith describes as the “everything bubble” – meaning everything is way overvalued to the point that it has to pop at some point.
“That will plunge us rapidly into recession in an all-out panic because people who have been investing based on such enormous delusions panic when they finally realize that, like Wile E. Coyote, they’ve run out past the edge of a mighty high cliff,” he explains.
“The crash of the Big Bond Bubble was inevitable because of the Fed’s QT (quantitative tightening) and the Fed’s raising of interest rates and the government’s massive addiction to endless and enormous deficits, requiring massive new bond issuances.”
The way the government continues its deficit spending, which adds ever-more debt to the national pile, is by piling enormous amounts of Treasury securities onto the market – securities that require buyers in order to transact. The problem now is that many countries such as China and Russia are dumping their Treasury bonds at the same time that there is a dearth of new Treasury buyers.
“Yield solves all demand problems by rising until demand emerges,” Haggith explains. “And that’s in part what we’re seeing now. All of this is happening as the Fed is unloading its balance sheet at record pace, having already shed over $1 trillion in securities in a little over a year.”
The result is a housing market deep freeze as the demolition of the bond bubble takes down the housing market along with it. Bank reserves are also getting squeezed by the devaluing of their bonds, which means more banks will soon collapse as well, setting even more falling dominoes in motion that will inevitably burst the entire bubble economy.
How much longer do you think America’s financial Ponzi scheme will last before going kaput? Learn more at Collapse.news.
Sources for this article include:
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.
