The war on cash has just gone to an entirely new level. When I heard that the European Union was planning to completely ban all cash transactions above 10,000 euros, I had a hard time believing it. There are so many wild rumors flying around on the Internet these days, and so I wasn’t going to write about this unless I could confirm it. Unfortunately, this particular rumor is quite real. Under the pretext of fighting “money laundering and terrorist financing”, the European Union will be entirely outlawing all cash payments greater than 10,000 euros. The following comes from the official website of the Council of the European Union…
By limiting large cash payments, the EU will make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money. An EU-wide maximum limit of €10.000 is set for cash payments. Member states will have the flexibility to impose a lower maximum limit if they wish.
So this means that in some countries the upper limit could potentially be a lot lower than 10,000 euros.
But instead of framing it as a major move toward a cashless society, the EU is trying to claim that this is all about fighting terrorists.
The following is what Zbyněk Stanjura, the Minister for Finance in the Czech Republic, has said about this upcoming change…
Terrorists and those who finance them are not welcome in Europe. In order to launder dirty money, criminal individuals and organisations had to look for loopholes in our existing rules which are already quite strict. But our intention is to close these loopholes further, and to apply even stricter rules in all EU member states. Large cash payments beyond €10.000 will become impossible. Trying to stay anonymous when buying or selling crypto-assets will become much more difficult. Hiding behind multiple layers of ownership of companies won’t work any more. It will even become difficult to launder dirty money via jewellers or goldsmiths.
Meanwhile, the European Central Bank has been actively considering the possibility of introducing a “digital euro”. The following comes from the official website of the European Central Bank…
We are working with the national central banks of the euro area to investigate whether to introduce a digital euro. It would be a central bank digital currency, an electronic equivalent to cash. And it would complement banknotes and coins, giving people an additional choice about how to pay.
Well isn’t that convenient?
As they take cash away from the general population, it turns out that they have already been working on the replacement.
Incredibly, the ECB even has the gall to claim that this new digital currency will be “like cash”…
A digital euro would offer an electronic means of payment that anyone could use in the euro area. It would be secure and user-friendly, like cash is today. As central bank money issued by the ECB, it would be different from “private money”, but you could also use a card or a phone app to pay with digital euro.
Yes, you will be able to spend it just like you can spend cash.
But unlike cash, a digital euro will allow authorities to track whatever you buy and sell with it.
Won’t that be wonderful?
By the way, the Federal Reserve is currently working on a digital currency as well.
And this is all happening as the private cryptocurrency industry is imploding all around us.
Many had believed that decentralized cryptocurrencies would be the future of commerce, but global central banks were never going to allow that to happen.
Instead, it appears that they intend to force all of us on to a cashless grid in which everyone uses digital currencies that are issued by them.
Needless to say, a lot of people out there are quite wary of any moves toward a cashless society because they believe that it is part of the “end times” scenario described in the Bible. According to one recent survey, approximately 39 percent of all Americans are convinced that we are living in the “end times” right now…
Nearly two in five Americans, including half of self-identified Christians and a quarter of the religiously unaffiliated, agree “we are living in the End Times,” a new study has found.
That’s about 39% of Americans who believe we are living in the End Times, according to Pew Research, highlighted by Lifeway Research.
Other surveys have come up with similar results.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us, because global events have definitely started to spin out of control in recent years. At this point, even secular websites are publishing articles about the surging popularity of “apocalyptic scenarios”…
There’s no denying that the apocalypse is currently having a moment, culturally and politically. It could be driven partly by the pandemic and fears of climate change. Those are actual, frightening apocalyptic scourges. Russia’s war has also set off alarm bells for certain evangelicals, as there was a Cold War tradition of identifying the country, variably, with Gog or Magog.
Seeing Slate discuss such things made me chuckle.
But this is where we are.
Just about every day, more crazy things take place that have literally never happened before. For example, I came across the following story earlier today…
For past 12 months, scientists have been studying a 50-second burst of energy from over a billion light-years away that could change how we understand how stars live and die.
In December 2021, a massive blast of energy hit the Earth’s atmosphere. Its source was a gamma-ray burst – one of the most powerful explosions in the universe – but not just any gamma ray burst.
One scientist said at the time that the event – named GRB 211211A – “looks unlike anything else we have seen before”.
As time rolls along, things are only going to get even more weird.
If you have been waiting for life to “return to normal”, you can stop right now.
It simply is not going to happen, and I believe that global events will accelerate even more during the early stages of 2023.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “End Times” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written six other books that are available on Amazon.com including “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending copies as gifts to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.
I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is definitely a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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.
Vast majority of women support more government, they love being cared for at men’s expense. Makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. 😉
In every culture back to the earliest times there has been a black market. It appears to be a necessary part of all societies, a way to help the poor to buy and sell things they otherwise could not get. There is a vast underworld free market as well: How will prostitutes and drug dealers get paid? They can’t very well set up traceable electronic transactions with spouses and the law both looking for illegal buying and selling. And without opportunities to get bribes, politicians would have no reason to run for office.
I read a book in which a character was the requisitions officer in the Army. He was deemed to be completely honest by his superiors, because they knew he only stole 10% from every transaction–no more, no less, as reliable as the sun rising every morning. There has to be a looseness in most deals similar to those I mentioned; it lubricates the gears of commerce in all societies.
I no longer bother commenting at pseudo–conservative sites which practice mass censorship by deleting one’s comments and/or shadow banning!
I am outta here . . .
I will make one FINAL comment here for this too–little–too–late article (to borrow a phrase from an old Reagan advisor): few fully grasp how all the data on us today has been ultra–linked going back decades of information collection.
This comes into play in subtle ways completely oblivious to most citizens: turned down for this job or employment, or that membership; experiencing problems and diffculties with your utility company, telecom company, ISP, etc.
Rejected rental apllications, etc., etc., etc. Rejected for this loan or that loan.
Back around 2003 to 2005, i learned from a private investigator for an employment agency whom I bribed for this information, that the reason I had been hired — then suddenly “unhired” even before I began my employment, was due to a “secret file” attached to my credit rating at various credit bureaus —– many of us unknowingly have these which tremendously affect our lives. (REMEMBER —- this was back in 2003 or 2005!) I have been active in lobbying AGAINST the offshoring of American jobs since 1980, and this was part of that “secret file” and greatly affected my employment potential!
And today all this personal data has been ultra–linked, so all is known by third parties — there is no privacy and hasn’t been for quite some time —- now imagine THEIR power for evil command–and–control and domination once CBDC has been implememted?!
Patriots must rise up an never let this happen, never give up our freedoms!