Despite so much evidence to the contrary, the Biden administration continues to insist that the U.S. economy is on the right track. But is that really true? Thanks to the Federal Reserve, interest rates are now much higher and the money supply has been contracting at the fastest pace since the Great Depression. As a result, large companies have been conducting mass layoffs, the housing bubble is imploding, and economic activity is rapidly slowing down all over the nation. But if you ask Joe Biden and his minions, what we are witnessing is all part of the plan. In fact, they continue to speak of “Bidenomics” as if it is a good thing…
Monday’s announcement is part of Biden’s greater push for his economic plan dubbed ‘Bidenomics,’ which ‘is rooted in the simple idea that we need to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up – not the top down,’ Dunn and Donilon wrote.
The president’s economic proposal includes plans to hike taxes on the uber-wealthy and corporations in order to subsidize social, climate and health programs.
Give me a break.
I’m not buying what they are selling, and most other Americans aren’t either. According to one recent survey, well over half of all Americans disapprove of how Biden has been handling the economy…
More than half – 54% – of Americans disapprove of how Biden is handing his job, while just 35% of respondents approved of his stewardship of the economy, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted earlier this month.
Those figures are a bad sign for Biden and his fellow Democrats.
Of course Biden is not responsible for the stunning reversal in money supply growth that we have been witnessing.
The money supply has been steadily shrinking since late last year, and during the month of April it actually contracted at the fastest pace that we have seen since the Great Depression…
During April 2023, the downturn accelerated even more as YOY growth in the money supply was at –12.0 percent. That’s down from March’s rate of –9.75 percent, and was far below April’s 2022’s rate of 6.6 percent. With negative growth now falling near or below –10 percent for the second month in a row, money-supply contraction is the largest we’ve seen since the Great Depression. Prior to March and April of this year, at no other point for at least sixty years has the money supply fallen by more than 6 percent (YoY) in any month.
It is important to understand that the economy does not immediately respond to a change in the money supply.
There is a lag. In other words, it takes time for the effects to filter through the entire system.
But we are already starting to see some very troubling signs. As I have been documenting in recent weeks, large companies have been conducting mass layoffs all over the country. Just a few days ago, Ford added their name to the list…
Ford Motor Co. is planning to lay off a minimum of “several hundred” salaried employees, starting as soon as next week, the Detroit Free Press has learned.
The action will be limited to white-collar workers in North America, perhaps just the U.S.
And we are starting to see initial claims for jobless benefits move higher.
In fact, Zero Hedge is reporting that we just saw the highest number in almost two years…
264,000 Americans filed for jobless benefits for the first time last week – the highest number since October 2021…
California, New Jersey, and Connecticut saw the largest jump in initial claims as perhaps the tech layoffs are starting to register (as severance packages run dry)…
Meanwhile, U.S. home prices continue to fall as Housing Bubble 2.0 continues to implode.
The following comes from CNN…
US home prices fell in May at the largest annual rate in more than a decade, according to a National Association of Realtors report released Thursday.
The median existing home price was $396,100 last month, down 3.1% from a year ago, marking the largest year-over-year price reduction since December 2011.
But don’t worry.
Joe Biden says that everything is going to be okay.
You believe him, don’t you?
The commercial real estate crisis also continues to grow. According to the Daily Mail, experts are calling it “a debt timebomb” that has the potential to absolutely devastate our financial system…
Commercial real estate has become a debt timebomb, experts have warned, as office towers remain empty in once-bustling cities.
The new era of remote work means ‘zombie’ workspaces remain vacant – while higher interest rates make it more expensive to buy or refinance buildings.
Of course the overall economy is steadily deteriorating, and it has been for quite some time.
At this point, the Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has now fallen for 14 months in a row.
And it isn’t just the U.S. that is slowing down. According to Yahoo News, the Chinese economy is also “losing momentum”…
China’s consumer-driven recovery is showing more signs of losing momentum as spending slows on everything from holiday travel to cars and homes, adding to expectations for more stimulus to support the economy.
Domestic travel spending during the recent holiday for the dragon-boat festival was lower than pre-pandemic levels, according to official data released this weekend. Home sales figures are below the level in previous years, while estimates for June car sales showed a drop from a year ago.
So what does all of this mean?
What it means is that we are clearly moving in the wrong direction.
The American people clearly understand this, and that is why Joe Biden’s poll numbers are so dismal.
But we should be thankful for one thing.
Economic conditions are still at least somewhat relatively stable, but the current state of affairs will not last indefinitely.
Much bigger problems are on the horizon.
So enjoy these troubled times while you can, because it won’t be too long before this economic crisis becomes far more severe.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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.
In short, they’re complete and total idiots. Rampant inflation harms the “bottom” and “middle” the most. As one who’s at or near the bottom, I can attest to the fact that our cost of living has nearly doubled since the idiot took office. My pay goes half as far as it did three years ago. The seniors in my family, their social security buys half of what it did three years ago. And my employer isn’t rich either. He can’t afford any raises.
How in the sam hill they think they can grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out while they’re simultaneously implementing policies, regulations, and legislation that is squeezing the last bit off life blood out of the “bottom” and “middle” is beyond me. There’s not a word to describe that level of stupidity and outright wickedness.