(Activist Post)—Are you ready for economic conditions to get even worse in 2025? It would be difficult to find any economist that is willing to argue that global economic conditions are better in late 2024 than they were in late 2023. The Chinese economy is deeply struggling, Europe is a mess, and four years of Bidenomics have had an absolutely devastating impact here in the United States. Unfortunately, the outlook for 2025 is not good at all. In fact, a WEF survey that was just released discovered that global business leaders are very concerned that a global recession is approaching…
Business leaders globally are worried about the risk of recession, labour shortages and rising inflation, despite some signs of improvement in economic conditions, a World Economic Forum survey said on Thursday.
Extreme weather events are an increasing concern, following a year of record temperatures, severe flooding and wildfires, including in major economies such as Brazil, Germany, Indonesia and the United States, according to the survey of more than 11,000 business leaders from G20 countries.
When asked to rank the top risks that they are facing over the next two years, business leaders actually ranked economic downturn number one…
Economic downturn is seen as the top risk for business leaders over the next two years, followed by labour and/or talent shortages and then inflation. Poverty and inequality ranked fourth, and extreme weather events came in fifth, the survey showed.
Business leaders tend to be relatively optimistic compared to the population as a whole, and so these results kind of surprised me.
Of course to many of us living in the United States, economic conditions are already so bad that it feels like a recession has already begun…
In August, roughly 60% of Americans said they believed the U.S. was in a recession, according to a survey from Affirm. Further, in October, more than half of Americans said they were worse off than they were four years ago, according to a Gallup poll.
If you are doing better than you were four years ago, you should consider yourself to be incredibly blessed.
Because the cost of living has been rising faster than paychecks have been, and so for most of us our standard of living has been steadily going down.
The Biden administration keeps telling us that inflation is under control, but the truth is that core consumer prices have risen for 53 months in a row…
The inflation story is far from over… no matter what The Fed or The White House claims…
For the 53rd straight month, core consumer prices rose on a MoM basis in October with the YoY pace re-accelerating to +3.33%…
Once upon a time, I actually enjoyed going to the grocery store.
But now it is so painful.
When I get to the register, I feel like asking the cashier what organ I should sell in order to pay for my groceries.
Sadly, we have reached a point where more Americans than ever are just barely scraping by from month to month. In fact, Bank of America is telling us that the proportion of the U.S. population that is living paycheck to paycheck rose by 12 percent from early 2022 to the second half of 2024…
However you define “paycheck to paycheck,” more of us seem to be living that way.
In the Bank of America surveys, the share of consumers who said they lived from paycheck to paycheck has gradually risen, from about 35% in early 2022 to 47% in the third quarter of 2024.
Obviously, economic conditions in this country have been trending in the wrong direction for quite a while.
So what will our country look like if we keep going down this path?
At this stage, more than 20 percent of all U.S. renters already have to use “all of their regular income” just to pay the rent…
Just over one in five (22%) U.S. renters say all of their regular income goes directly to paying their rent, according to a recent Redfin-commissioned survey.
Working a second job is also a fairly common way for renters to pay housing costs, with 20% of renters citing that method. Nearly the same share (19%) say they have worked a job they hated to afford rent.
The bottom levels of the economic food chain are getting absolutely crushed.
In a desperate attempt to stay afloat, many Americans are piling up staggering amounts of debt. According to the New York Federal Reserve, total credit card debt in the U.S. just reached another brand new all-time record high…
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” 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.
