(The Economic Collapse Blog)—For many years, pundits have been warning us that the U.S. dollar would collapse. In 2025, it is actually starting to happen. The U.S. dollar hit a three year low against other global currencies last week, and on Wednesday the crash of the dollar resumed. Overall, the U.S. dollar is now down about 9 percent over the past 3 months. The currency that has benefitted the most is the Swiss franc.
The USD/CHF recently hit the lowest level that we have seen in 14 years. What we are witnessing is literally a bloodbath, and many experts are suggesting that our reserve currency status is now in serious jeopardy.
Many were hoping that the dollar would bounce back this week, but there was more carnage on Wednesday…
The dollar resumed its fall on Wednesday with both safe havens and risk sensitive currencies outperforming the greenback as traders waited to see if U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration reaches new trading agreements with partners.
The dollar tumbled last week on concerns over the economic impact new tariffs will have, and as investors shifted allocations overseas due to uncertainty over the erratic implementation of the trade levies.
To me, one of the best ways to evaluate the strength of the U.S. dollar is to look at the price of gold.
Needless to say, the price of gold in U.S. dollars has been absolutely soaring lately, and on Wednesday it went up another 3.1 percent…
Gold prices extended their record run on Wednesday, to breach $3,300 per ounce, as a weaker dollar and escalating U.S.-China trade tensions pushed investors towards the safe-haven asset.
Spot gold climbed 3.1% to $3,327.78 an ounce.
During times of financial chaos, investors tend to flock to gold.
And times are definitely very chaotic right now.
If the dollar continues to become more unstable, other global currencies will inevitably become a lot more attractive.
At this point, we are being warned that the dollar’s role as the primary reserve currency of the planet is “looking increasingly uncertain”…
Specifically, the dollar’s status as a reliable “safe haven” has been tarnished, and its role as the de facto global reserve currency has been looking increasingly uncertain.
Signs of growing dissatisfaction with the dollar can be seen in the breakdown of its longstanding correlation with other markets.
Having the primary reserve currency of the world has been a major advantage for us, but there are other currencies that are widely used in global trade.
In recent weeks, the euro, the Swiss franc and the Japanese yen have all done extremely well…
For decades, the dollar, the Swiss franc and Japanese yen were among the most popular options for investors seeking calmer ports in volatile markets.
But while the yen, franc and euro have shot higher over the past few weeks, the ICE U.S. Dollar Index, a popular gauge of the dollar’s value against its main currency rivals, sank to its lowest level in three years. By comparison, the Swiss franc recently climbed to its strongest level in 14 years.
Could the euro or one of the major currencies in Asia eventually take the place of the U.S. dollar?
It is entirely possible.
The truth is that the status of the U.S. dollar has already been slipping.
According to MarketWatch, “the dollar’s share of global central-bank reserves has been shrinking since the late 1990s”…
By some measures, the world has been shifting away from its dependence on the dollar for decades. Data from the International Monetary Fund show the dollar’s share of global central-bank reserves has been shrinking since the late 1990s.
When the dollar is strong, U.S. government bonds are attractive to foreign investors. This keeps our borrowing costs down.
But in recent weeks we have witnessed a “major sell-off” in bonds at the same time that stocks have been going down…
During the financial crisis of 2008, investors around the world bought more Treasury bonds, confident that despite the crash, this was the safest place in the world for their money. That is how things usually go: The bond market moves in the opposite direction as stocks.
This time, as the stock market took a nosedive, an alarming trend emerged. Investors were dumping their U.S. government bonds. The yield on the 10-year Treasury jumped from 4% to 4.5% in a week, a huge jump for the bond market that indicates a major sell-off. Investors were putting their money into euros, yen, pounds, and gold instead of into dollars.
We haven’t seen a financial crisis like this in a long time.
And we only have a limited amount of time to turn this around before things start getting really messy.
If this new crisis begins to spiral out of control, there will be an immense amount of pain, and we could witness a collapse of confidence in the U.S. dollar.
One expert is warning that the U.S. dollar has now been put on a “watch list”…
“It is too early to call if we are seeing the demise of the dollar, but the dollar has certainly been put on a ‘watch list,’” says Kevin Gallagher, director of the Global Development Policy Center at Boston University. For the rest of the world, “The U.S. is no longer innocent until proven guilty, but the opposite.”
Sadly, most Americans simply do not understand how important the strength of the dollar is.
Our primary export is currency. For decades, we have been exchanging the world’s dominant currency for goods manufactured in poorer nations all over the planet.
If the U.S. dollar becomes much weaker, our standard of living will go way down. Unfortunately, it appears that there are those in positions of power that want to see the value of the U.S. dollar drop.
The chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran, believes that devaluing the dollar is the best way to reduce our trade deficit…
For Miran, tariffs and moving away from a strong dollar could have “the broadest ramifications of any policies in decades, fundamentally reshaping the global trade and financial systems”.
Miran’s essay argues that a strong dollar makes US exports less competitive and imports cheaper, while handicapping American manufacturers as it discourages investing in building factories in the United States.
“The deep unhappiness with the prevailing economic order is rooted in persistent overvaluation of the dollar and asymmetric trade conditions,” Miran wrote.
It is true that if the dollar is substantially devalued our trade deficit will be reduced.
But in the process our standard of living will be greatly diminished.
This would particularly be true for those on the bottom levels of the economic food chain.
And if another global reserve currency ultimately takes the place of the U.S. dollar, that would be absolutely catastrophic for our standard of living.
At this stage in our history, the strength of the United States is dependent upon the strength of our currency to a very large degree. If the dollar crashes and burns, so will our society as a whole.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.
