(International Man)—“You can’t taper a Ponzi scheme.” Financial commentator and Bitcoin pioneer Max Keiser originally said these simple yet profound words.
A Ponzi scheme is an unsustainable scam that relies on a continuous influx of new money to keep it going. The scheme collapses if the flow of new money slows down or tapers. Many believe the Federal Reserve is running what amounts to a giant Ponzi scheme.
That’s because the US government’s obscene spending and skyrocketing debt have reached an inflection point where the whole system will collapse unless the Fed pumps an ever-increasing amount of new fake money into the system.
Government spending is the leading cause of the problem. However, the government cannot even slow the growth rate of spending, let alone cut it. Here’s why.
The biggest expenditures for the US government are so-called entitlements. It’s unlikely any politician will cut these. On the contrary, I expect them to continue growing as the last Baby Boomers enter retirement in 2031.
With the most precarious geopolitical situation since World War 2, so-called defense spending seems unlikely to be cut. Instead, it is all but certain to increase. Income Security is a catch-all category for different types of welfare. That’s unlikely to be cut too.
Efforts to reduce expenditures will be meaningless unless it becomes politically acceptable to cut entitlements, national defense, and welfare. Further, interest expense is exploding higher.
The federal interest expense recently exceeded $1 trillion for the first time and is shooting higher. That means the interest expense is already bigger than defense spending and everything else in the budget except for Social Security, which it will also likely exceed soon.
The cost of debt service (interest expense) is taking up a larger portion of the budget, leaving less for other expenditures. That means the government has to borrow increasingly larger amounts to maintain basic functions.
The situation is compounded by the fact that the more the US government borrows, the larger the interest expense on the federal debt, which causes it to borrow even more.
Borrowing money to pay debt service is the inflection point in the debt spiral, and the US is at that point. Here’s the bottom line with the budget. Expenditures have nowhere to go but up.
But don’t count on increased revenue to offset these increases in expenditures. Even if tax rates went to 100%, it would not be enough to stop the deficits—and the debt needed to finance them—from growing.
The truth is, no matter what happens, the debt will not stop growing. It’s not even going to slow down. The debt is increasing exponentially.
The only way the US government can continue to finance itself is for the Fed to create ever-increasing amounts of fake money.
If the Fed doesn’t provide more monetary accommodation to lower interest rates, the growing interest expense will bankrupt the US government… and bring down the entire debt-based economy with it. In short, the Fed must print ever-increasing quantities of fake money, or the system will collapse.
Ludwig von Mises, the godfather of free-market Austrian economics, summed up the Fed’s dilemma:
“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
The US government will not voluntarily “abandon credit expansion,” as Mises puts it because Washington is dependent on issuing increasing amounts of debt to pay for the ever-growing costs of Social Security, national defense, welfare, and interest on the federal debt.
As Max Keiser succinctly said, “You can’t taper a Ponzi scheme.”
That means their only choice is to debase the US dollar by ever-increasing amounts until, as Mises puts it, the “final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
That’s why I am convinced extreme currency debasement is the inevitable outcome of the debt spiral. All the rest is noise.
Michael Saylor captured the essence of the situation when he said, “The road to serfdom consists of working exponentially harder to earn a currency that is growing exponentially weaker.”
I believe rampant currency debasement will be the most important investment trend of this decade, and it will devastate most people.
The worst of it could go down soon… and it won’t be pretty. It will result in an enormous wealth transfer from savers and regular people to the parasitic class—politicians, central bankers, and those connected to them.
Countless millions throughout history were wiped out financially—or worse—because they failed to see the correct Big Picture as their governments went bankrupt.
Don’t be one of them. That’s exactly why I just released an urgent new report with all the details, including what you must do to prepare.
It’s called The Most Dangerous Economic Crisis in 100 Years… the Top 3 Strategies You Need Right Now.
Click here to download the PDF now.
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.
