(The Economic Collapse Blog)—It is definitely starting to look a lot like 2008 and 2009 again. Those years were such a painful time for our country, and in many ways we still haven’t fully recovered from the damage that was inflicted upon us during that era. Unfortunately, so many of the exact same things that we experienced back then are starting to happen in our time. For example, the Great Recession brought us the greatest foreclosure crisis in the history of our nation, and now foreclosures are really starting to spike here in 2024. In fact, the number of new foreclosure filings in the U.S. just jumped 10 percent in a single month…
Home foreclosures are on the up across the US as Americans continue to battle against soaring interest rates and rising costs.
Last month, 37,679 properties had a foreclosure filing, according to fresh figures from real estate data provider ATTOM – up 10 percent from the month prior.
According to the pundits, that wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did.
Interestingly, Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware actually experienced the fastest increase in foreclosure filings last month.
Nevada was second, and that was due to the large number of foreclosure filings in Las Vegas…
Nevada’s position in the ranking is largely due to foreclosure filings in Las Vegas, where many people lost their jobs when tourism crashed during pandemic lockdowns.
According to ATTOM, Las Vegas had a foreclosure filing on one in every 1,923 housing units in January.
This is a really troubling sign.
When the economy is booming, Las Vegas is booming even more. But when hard times arrive, times are even harder in Las Vegas.
So let’s watch and see if this trend continues.
Meanwhile, it is also being reported that the number of completed foreclosures in the U.S. was up 13 percent compared to the previous month.
In Michigan, the number of completed foreclosures actually shot up by “a huge 200 percent”…
Michigan saw the fastest rise in completed foreclosures – up a huge 200 percent. This was largely down to high rates of foreclosure filings in Detroit.
I remember writing articles about how some homes in Detroit were literally selling for one dollar when things were at their worst.
Has another housing crash begun? We are certainly ripe for one. Thanks to painfully high interest rates, buying a home has become out of reach for most of the population.
Unless interest rates go down dramatically, home prices have got to fall, and that is going to cause all sorts of problems. Of course a horrifying commercial real estate crisis is already here.
Prices have crashed all over the nation, and now many office buildings that were once worth millions of dollars are simply being torn down. In fact, in Los Angeles there is a plan to tear down a very large office building in order to build just 30 EV charging stations…
This is absolutely crazy…
An owner of an office building in LA is seeking approval to tear down the building and construct 30 EV charging stations
I don’t know what’s crazier…this headline or seeing office properties drop 80-90% in just a few years
The commercial real estate recession (primarily office) has gone from scary to a meltdown in many cities across the US and it seems as though the damage is permanent
If we really are heading into a major economic slowdown, we would also expect retailers to be shutting down stores all over America, and that is precisely what we are witnessing right now.
Incredibly, even Walmart reduced the number of stores that it operates by 102 last year…
Walmart last year closed 23 stores across the US, eight of which were in Illinois, it emerged this week
Overall, its total number of stores fell by 102, from 4,717 in January 2023 to 4,615 a year later.
That’s because in addition to the 23 closures, Walmart sold a combined 79 Moosejaw and Bonobos locations after selling the two retailers.
If even Walmart sees a need to batten down the hatches, that is a really bad sign. On top of everything else, large employers continue to conduct mass layoffs from coast to coast.
Last week, many were saddened to hear that Vice Media Group is laying off hundreds of workers as it continues to spiral toward oblivion…
Vice Media Group plans to lay off hundreds of employees and stop publishing on its flagship news website, the company’s chief executive said in a memo to employees Thursday — a stunning setback for a digital media pioneer that ascended to cultural prominence more than a decade ago.
“It is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously,” Vice CEO Bruce Dixon said in the memo, which was seen by NBC News. Vice Media did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment on Thursday’s news.
Everyone knew that Vice was in dire straits, and so those layoffs are not exactly a shock.
But why has Google suddenly decided to give the axe to thousands of workers?…
Google has initiated significant layoffs across its various teams, including the Voice Assistant, hardware, engineering and ad sales teams, marking a continuation of the tech industry’s trend towards reducing workforce expenses. The layoffs have affected hundreds of employees within the Voice Assistant unit; hardware teams responsible for Pixel, Nest and Fitbit products; and a considerable portion of the augmented reality (AR) team. This move is part of Google’s broader effort to streamline operations and align resources with its most significant product priorities.
According to The Verge, the total number is in the thousands. This comes at a time when Google parent, Alphabet Inc., reported record profits in late January. The company reported $20.4 billion in net income in Q4.
Google is one of the most successful companies in the entire world, and they are swimming in cash.
If they feel the need to ruthlessly cut workers, what kind of sign is that for the rest of the economy?
Sadly, the truth is that it has become quite apparent that big trouble is ahead.
2024 is going to be such an important turning point for the economy, and it is also going to be such an important turning point for the nation as a whole.
The state of the economy will certainly be a central issue during the upcoming election season, but there are no easy answers for the problems that we are now facing.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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.
