The feckless leadership of the Biden regime combined with idiotic legislation from Congress since the beginning of the pandemic take most of the blame for the economic woes this nation faces. Add in lingering effects from the lockdowns and self-defacing sanctions we’ve imposed on Russia and you have the lion’s share of what’s causing our fiscal woes.
Nowhere on the current list is Vladimir Putin despite the fact that Democrats keep calling our inflation problems the “Putin Price Hikes.” Their invasion of Ukraine in and of itself did not spike inflation, a fact that is blatant prima facie when we see that price hikes began well before the first Russian tank entered Ukraine. But now that we’re on the verge of recession, it’s very possible for Russia to play some cards they have been holding for a while, cards that could easily exacerbate the problems we’re facing already.
According to Washington Times:
Russia itself has seen foreign investment dry up, hundreds of Western companies pull out, and the domestic GDP set to shrink by 10% or more this year. But the pain hasn’t been all one-sided since President Vladimir Putin gave a green light for the invasion of his neighbor Feb. 24.
Economics specialists and foreign policy observers say the Kremlin still has “some cards” left to play in the global marketplace, particularly in the fuel and food sectors, and could soon decide to pull those levers in order to maximize its leverage in any future peace negotiations with Kyiv. Such Russian tactics, if employed, would likely drive gas, grain and wheat prices even higher than today’s record levels.
Recent days have brought fresh warning signs of just how much sway Moscow holds over key sectors, despite its relatively meager economy — Russia’s GDP is slightly smaller than that of Italy or South Korea — which boasts nowhere near the financial power and influence over global markets of the U.S. or China. Russian officials said Thursday that they were cutting natural gas supplies to Europe even further, bringing the current operating level of the major Nord Stream 1 pipeline down to just 40%, according to Reuters.
The Kremlin blamed the slowdown on delays in planned repairs to the pipeline and said that Western economic sanctions — instituted in direct response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year — have made it difficult to acquire the necessary parts and equipment. But European officials aren’t buying that rationale.
Germany’s chief power regulator, Klaus Mueller, called the explanation “unfounded” and said the decision by Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom appears designed to drive fuel prices higher. The move comes at a crucial moment for Germany and for Europe as a whole, which is trying to quickly move away from dependence on Russian oil and gas but will still rely on that fuel for the coming winter months.
“We could perhaps get through the summer as the heating season is over. But it is imperative that we fill the storage facilities to get through the winter,” Mr. Mueller told the Germany news outlet Rheinische Post.
Shortly after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Europe pledged to wind down its dependence on Russian oil and gas. But it’s likely to take years before Europe can fully free itself from Russian fuel, and in the interim Mr. Putin could further reduce supplies in a bid to crack Europe’s solidarity and perhaps even convince the West to ease economic sanctions on Moscow.
Amid rapidly rising food and fuel prices, there are already signs that public opinion in Europe is shifting away from a hard-line anti-Russia stance and toward peace, perhaps in the hopes that a cease-fire in Ukraine may bring economic relief.
A major study by the European Council on Foreign Relations published this week found that a plurality of Europeans, about 35%, favor “peace now even at the cost of Ukrainian concessions to Russia.” Researchers believe that number could rise further if the economic fallout from the Russia-Ukraine war grows and drives already out-of-control inflation even higher.
Frustration also is rising in the U.S., where average nationwide gas prices hit $5 per gallon this month for the first time in history.
With the United States so heavily dependent on foreign imports to keep our massive economy going, we’re a few geopolitical moves away from being on the brink of economic collapse. The dollar is terrifying and Fed Chair Jerome Powell hinted today that the world is shifting away from using it as the World Reserve Currency. He didn’t say those words explicitly, but it was implied as he pushed toward the globalist dream of Central Bank Digital Currencies.
Powell: “Rapid changes are taking place in the global monetary system that may affect the international role of the dollar.” A US central bank digital currency is being examined to “help the US dollar’s international standing.”
NEW – Powell: "Rapid changes are taking place in the global monetary system that may affect the international role of the dollar."
A US central bank digital currency is being examined to "help the US dollar's international standing." pic.twitter.com/htP6r1brNz
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) June 17, 2022
Joe Biden is begging for more oil. Cows and chickens are dying at massive rates. Grain is quickly becoming scarce. If ever there was a time to stock up on food and move your wealth or retirement to precious metals, it’s now.
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.
