(Epic Economist)—There was a time when the American dream included home ownership, but that dream has now become a nightmare for many. That’s because millions of Americans are going to see their home equity being wiped out by the imminent housing collapse.
A report from credit analytics firm TransUnion found that the average U.S. household is struggling to keep up with near 8% mortgage rates, and many are already losing their properties as they get underwater on their mortgage loans.
On top of that, with buyers priced out and more sellers slashing their prices to sell properties before the end of 2023, many major cities are already seeing double-digit quarterly declines, such as San Francisco, where home prices came down by as much as 15% in the third quarter, as well as Seattle, and Austin, which reported a respective drop of 12% and 11% drop during the same period.
The red flags of a housing crash are becoming more apparent. If you’re new to our channel, thank you for joining us. Today, we will break down the latest data on the real estate market meltdown. And if you’re a regular here, thank you for your support. We have a lot to cover today, so we hope you’re prepared to hear this.
Over the past couple of weeks, major signs of distress emerged in the U.S. housing market, leading experts to worry about where we’re headed. Fortune said that the market is starting to “crack,” while Wells Fargo economists predicted a real estate recession due to rising mortgage rates.
To put it simply, between the high cost of the home and the elevated interest payments, many Americans simply can’t afford to purchase a new home anymore. As a result, sellers are slashing their listing prices right now. Redfin’s most recent housing market update indicates that approximately 1 in 15 U.S. homes on the market decreased in price in the past quarter. Compared to the same period in prior years, this is an alarmingly high rate.
To make things even worse, more than one in 10 homes bought in the past year are worth less than what owners owe on their mortgage. That’s what the new report released by real estate data firm Black Knight shows. About 11% of people who borrowed to buy homes in 2022 now owe more than the properties are worth, a figure that has steadily climbed since the start of 2023.
Moreover, more than one out of every four buyers who purchased a home in the 11 months of 2023 have properties worth less than the loans on them, meaning that they are already underwater on their mortgages and at risk of being foreclosed. That’s a very worrying development. Rising delinquency rates are an indication that conditions will get even more chaotic because once a mortgage payment is more than 90 days overdue, the threat of foreclosure becomes imminent. It is feared hundreds of thousands of Americans could be impacted by foreclosure in December.
The credit crisis can also play a major role as more expensive borrowing costs could further reduce the affordability of homes. When access to credit becomes more restricted, it can impact the number of potential buyers, and slow down property sales. In addition, global economic events, such as ongoing geopolitical conflicts, China’s economic downturn, and global food shortages can spill over into local property markets, affecting investor sentiment and confidence.
Ultimately, the coming housing crash will destroy the wealth many hard-working families took decades to build. And that’s the saddest part of this crisis because we can already see the slow-motion train wreck happening before our eyes. But the Federal Reserve and the federal government are still going to let it happen. It’s only by taking the equity of the bottom 90% of Americans that they will be able to stop the bleeding caused by the trillions of printed dollars that they pumped into the economy since 2020.
Don’t be mistaken. This is a man-made disaster. They want you to lose everything you worked for so that they can bring inflation down again.
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.
“To make things even worse, more than one in 10 homes bought in the past year are worth less than what owners owe on their mortgage.”
OF COURSE, that is what Catherine Austin Fitts (solari DOT com) has been saying for two to three years or more now — what the fellow at the link below outlines — — and it isn’t to bring inflation down, oh gullible one — — it is to destroy us!
https : //www DOT brighteon DOT com/786bdc7c-d27e-4fe4-b203-beebd276da5e