(Alt-Market)—This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group
During the 2020 pandemic hysteria there was a mad rush by globalist institutions like the WEF, IMF, BIS and numerous national central banks to speed-run the concept of “CBDCs” (Central Bank Digital Currencies) into the mainstream consciousness. The idea of digital currencies rooted to a blockchain ledger was presented as a solution to the pandemic. A number of globalists asserted that digital exchange would be necessary because “paper money carries the covid virus.”
This was, of course, complete nonsense. There was zero evidence that shifting to digital would prevent the spread of the virus in any way. But, as I’ve said for years now, covid was their big play. It was intended to become a nexus point for a global coup; the “New World Order” takeover. The elites figured the population was so terrified that they would agree to anything without a logical reason.
They were wrong, at least in the long run. The virus was a dud (which seemed to catch them by surprise) and the death rate was minimal (0.23% median IFR). The public eventually woke up to the deception and the agenda was forced to dissolve, largely due to nearly half of all US states blocking the mandates. If Americans could live just fine without restrictions, then the rest of the world was going to follow.
I mention the pandemic once again because the attempted coup gave the general public a once in a lifetime insight into the plans and motives of the globalists. This event changed everything. Millions of people who once thought that “conspiracy theorists” were crazy just had their eyes opened to a dark reality. There really is an international cabal. They really do make evil plans in smoky rooms. They really do want a “New World Order.”
And, a big part of this new order is a global digital currency scheme.
As researchers, all of our suspicions were confirmed. Seeing the intended plans of the elites across Europe and developing nations like China and India, it’s clear that CBDCs are the ultimate economic control mechanism. Why? Because without physical money, the populace can no longer engage in trade without governments and central banks acting as the middle man.
Look at it this way: During the pandemic mandates the Biden Administration and many other governments sought to institute the first stages of what would ultimately become a vaccine passport system.
First, employers would be required by law to check workers for updated vaccination, or face endless fines. Once this became the norm, then mandatory covid tracking apps would be introduced as the only way to enter government buildings and mass transit. Eventually, everyone would be forced to use their phones (and a QR code) to get access to public places or purchase anything anywhere.
The final domino would be CBDCs and a cashless society, but Biden and friends did not have this technology in place.
Without CBDCs the control system falls apart. With physical cash, there’s no way for the government to control transactions. They can de-bank individuals who refuse to comply (as the Canadian government did), but with physical exchange there is always a path to rebellion.
Even without cash, the public could use gold and silver or barter. People could create their own black markets and survive. However, with CBDCs widely entrenched, participation in the wider economy would be impossible.
The globalists asserted that de-banking and economic banishment was not a program of “forced vaccination” (although that was the ultimate endgame). Rather, they argued cynically that people still had a “choice” – They could take the vax and live a somewhat normal life within the system, or, they could refuse the vax and be cut off from the economy, and thus cut off from most of society and likely die from abject poverty.
This is, essentially, the political left’s “consequence culture” argument.
I really hope people never forget the insanity of this era and how close we came to an Orwellian hellscape. Never forget; the globalists and the political left tried to extort you into becoming a medical slave for the rest of your life. And their plan was to use economic access as the leverage to force you into submission.
So what happened? Where did all the rhetoric about CBDCs go? It was everywhere for four years and then, it was dust in the wind. Why have central banks gone radio silent?
Sadly the plan has not been canceled, it has only been moved to the background and it continues to develop behind the curtain. The Bank for International Settlement (BIS) seems to be at the helm, for now, and is pushing forward with various projects to test CBDCs in cross border trade and tracking. Currently, they are working on “Project Agora”.
Project Agora is process for “tokenization” of central bank reserves – Meaning, they want to make it possible for central banks to trade assets with each other using a blockchain ledger without complications. This would be a primary step in the eventual tokenization of all central bank transactions, including transactions with corporate banks and governments.
It should be noted that the Trump Administration and the US Senate has been issuing executive orders and legislation to block the Federal Reserve from engaging in CBDCs until at least 2030. However, the Fed seems to be ignoring these demands. According to the BIS, the Fed is STILL participating in Project Agora and the Fed has not announced any withdrawal from that program.
Interestingly, the BIS avoids using the acronym “CBDC” in most of their latest project announcements. But, this is exactly what they are working on. They do mention all national legal frameworks still apply within their ledger transactions. To translate, that means that central banks and allied governments will retain tracking and control of all assets that are traded through the system (No anonymous transactions and all transactions can be frozen).
This should be worrying for everyone and the implications are staggering. The BIS and its central banking partners are quietly building the framework for national digital currency systems to interact with other national digital currency systems.
In the end, the BIS and its allies will become the middlemen for all the world’s transactions. Furthermore, once national CBDCs become the norm, the elites are only one step away from introducing a GLOBAL CBDC: A one-world digital currency.
I continue to believe that the introduction of this system will require the collapse of the US dollar. But, this event may not happen the way many of us originally imagined. I and many other economists initially believed that the alternative digital currency system to unseat the dollar would be introduced through the BRICS economic bloc, which has been working closely with the IMF.
We also argued that a crash would have to occur through internal sabotage, clearing the path for a dollar collapse.
Something seems to have changed. The influence of the BRICS has been greatly diminished in the past five years. The plan may not be to crash the dollar from within the US through domestic mishap or sabotage, at least not right away. Rather, the plan might be to introduce CBDCs in every western country that is politically cooperative with the globalists and cut out the dollar over time as the world reserve.
Recent announcements from the European Union and the European Central Bank suggest that they are preparing to bring in CBDCs regardless of what the US does.
In other words, it looks as though far-left governments in Europe, Australia and Canada plan to build a global currency network that cuts out the dollar in order to crash the dollar. They can then say it was entirely the fault of backwards conservative Americans who “live in the past and refuse to go digital…”
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve continues to work with the BIS and the globalists to make the dollar ready for tokenization with the expectation that Americans will eventually be forced to go along with the agenda, or risk being left in the dust.
Will this strategy work? It’s hard to say. The pandemic plan failed and only ended up radicalizing millions of people against the globalists by default. On top of that, the mass immigration agenda in Europe is not going over well and it’s driving the citizens to replace liberal governments with hard-right parties like Restore and AFD. But, when money becomes the weapon, things can turn ugly fast. CBDCs could create unprecedented social and political leverage for the globalists.
Luckily, the public is already well aware of the existence of CBDCs and many of the threats they pose. The globalists can try to hide their projects in a fog of obscurity and they can try to change the terms by using words like “tokenization”, but the populace is still going to recognize the dangers because their radar is now up.
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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.
