(Natural News)—People all across America are reportedly being shut out from stores, restaurants and other businesses as these establishments are now refusing to take cash for payment. Though numerous shops have one sign proudly proclaiming how welcoming and inclusive they are, next to it another says, “No cash accepted.”
As a result, the “unbanked” – people who do not have accounts in financial institutions – are having a hard time processing electronic transactions and, to date, there are roughly six million of them in the U.S., which is about the population of Wisconsin. Outside of America, more than a billion people do not have a bank account.
There are several reasons why people opt out of banking. Back in 2021, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) held a survey of households about their connections to the banking system and asked why they didn’t have a bank account. The top reason, with over 40 percent of respondents, was that they didn’t have enough money to meet the minimum balance set by the banks. According to recent FDIC data, about 25 percent of people earning less than $15,000 a year are unbanked. Among those earning more than $75,000 a year, almost every person surveyed had some type of bank account. Another reason why customers do not choose to have accounts in financial establishments is that they have become skeptical of banks. Roughly one-third of survey respondents agreed that “Avoiding a bank gives more privacy,” while another one-third said they simply “do not trust banks.” Moreover, another one-quarter of respondents felt bank account fees were too high and about the same proportion felt fees were too unpredictable.
A recent Bankrate survey also showed that basic monthly service fees range between $5 and $15. Beyond these steady fees, banks earn $4 to $5 each time people withdraw cash from an ATM or need services like getting cashier’s checks. Unexpected bills can result in overdraft fees of about $25 each time an account is overdrawn.
Another set of data showed that there are almost six million “unbanked” and 19 million “underbanked” U.S. households. People with a bank account but who primarily rely on alternative services such as check cashing outlets are called “the underbanked.” As 2.5 people live in the average household, more than 15 million people are living in a home with no connection to banks and 48 million more are in homes with only a tenuous connection to banks – meaning, one out of every five people in the U.S. has little or no connection to banks or other financial institutions. That can leave them shut out from stores, restaurants, transportation and medical providers that don’t take cash.
The pandemic accelerated the shift to digital payments
A lot of business owners across America and even worldwide, blame it on the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic as to why the shift to cashless transactions was catalyzed.
Forty-one percent of Americans said they did not use cash for their purchases in a typical week in 2022, up from 29 percent in 2018, according to a Pew Research Center survey released last October and business owners found it favorable for their enterprises. According to “experts,” the shift paved the way to “rising consumer demand, faster checkout, lower labor costs and increased security.” Those who wait risk losing revenue, they said.
However, there are drawbacks to going cash-free. These include the learning curve for entrepreneurs who may not understand how to set up digital payments; a lack of accessibility to credit cards for low-income consumers; and the most risky – privacy and surveillance. The threat that a digital financial system can be in the hands of one controlling body spells tyranny and totalitarianism. The stakes are too high. (Related: BIG BROTHER ALERT: CBDC projects around the world not installing privacy safeguards, British privacy organization finds.)
Meanwhile, a lot of people still prefer the anonymity that cash transactions provide. Cash is also seen as a way for spenders to remain aware of their expenditures. To top it all, the recent bank turmoil has made many depositors question the stability of the banking system. Also, a lot of business owners are still hesitant about moving too quickly with a technology that could go obsolete at any time.
Head over to DollarDemise.com to read more about the death of the United States dollar as a currency.
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.
Pew Research Center is a Wall Street Fakey Bakey operation, wish the RUBES would stop citing them!! (And grow some neurons to become a tad more aware?!)
ALL these RINO – snowflakey –getover guys screamed they would only use cash, when frigging OBVIOUSLY if TPTB were instituting CBDC they would go cashless!
Something about the blatantly obvious the getover rubes cannot comprehend!!!
My little Mom & Pop Shop will ALWAYS take Cash. Cash is a Mom & Pop Shop’s best friend. Payment without having to give a percentage or more to the credit card processors. Darn right, I’ll take cash.
In fact my office has this sign.
We take the following forms of payment:
CASH
Check
Credit/Debt Cards
ApplePay
Gold and Silver
First Born Son/Daughter (upon inspection)
Chickens