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Thanks To The Rapidly Imploding U.S. Economy, Joe Biden’s Poll Numbers Have Plunged To Unprecedented Levels

July 6, 2022July 6, 2022 by Michael

These are not good times for Joe Biden. When the U.S. economy is performing well whoever is in the White House is going to get most of the credit. Likewise, when the U.S. economy is performing poorly whoever is in the White House is going to get most of the blame. That is just the way that it is, and that is one of the primary reasons why most Americans are quite displeased with Joe Biden right now. Things are not going well at all, and the outlook for the months ahead is even worse. The American people are becoming increasingly frustrated, and a new Gallup poll that was just released discovered that “confidence” in the presidency has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded…

President Joe Biden has pushed the presidency to a place it hasn’t been in nearly 50 years.

In the latest Gallup poll, less than a quarter of those surveyed have “confidence” in the presidency, worse than during the Trump presidency and nearly as bad as the end of the George W. Bush presidency.

Going back to 1975, Gallup has never recorded a confidence reading as low as Biden’s 23%.

Other polls have come up with similarly stunning results. For example, a different survey that was just released discovered that a whopping 88 percent of all Americans believe that the nation is heading in the wrong direction…

The White House was faced with another dire poll Tuesday that found that 54 percent of Americans believe the middle class hasn’t benefited ‘at all’ from President Joe Biden’s policies.

On top of that, the new Monmouth University Poll found that 88 percent of Americans surveyed said the country was headed in the wrong direction – with just 10 percent saying it’s headed the right way – a record low.

Just think about that.

88 percent.

In this day and age, it is difficult to get 88 percent of Americans to agree on anything.

But almost all of us seem to agree that the country is going downhill, and according to that same survey Americans are currently more concerned about economic matters than anything else…

Nearly half those surveyed said inflation and gas were the biggest concerns currently facing their families, with 33 percent saying inflation and 15 percent pointing to fuel costs.

A lot of people out there don’t really care much about what is going on in the world until it starts affecting their personal finances.

And these days the American people are feeling a tremendous amount of pain.

In fact, the consumer confidence index that is put out by the University of Michigan just fell to an all-time record low…

The University of Michigan’s gauge of consumer sentiment fell sharply to a record-low reading of 50.2, down from a May reading of 58.4. Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal had expected an June reading of 59.

The level is comparable to the low point reached in the middle of the 1980 recession, the university said.

The American people have never been more pessimistic about the economy.

Ever.

And we have a guy in the White House that has a really difficult time even putting a coherent sentence together at this point.

As you celebrate the 4th tomorrow, remember our President’s inspiring words about this great nation. pic.twitter.com/EcNoXNuY8l

— Bill D’Agostino (@Banned_Bill) July 3, 2022

Of course the team around Biden is not exactly competent either.

Time after time, the Biden administration has made colossal blunders. This week, we learned that someone in the Biden administration apparently thought that it would be a good idea to send oil from our strategic petroleum reserve to China…

Because he hates Americans, President Joe Biden is shipping much-needed American oil to foreign countries, including… China.

The whole idea of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is owned by the U.S. government, specifically the U.S. Department of Energy, is to hold on to about 700 million barrels of oil in the event of an emergency or disruption.

I was floored when I first read that.

Who would be stupid enough to do such a thing?

Someday we are going to need the oil in the strategic petroleum reserve, and hopefully there will be some left when that moment finally arrives.

This week we have also been getting more numbers that indicate that the economic slowdown in the United States appears to be picking up speed.

According to LinkedIn, hiring in the U.S. is really starting to fall off…

LinkedIn, a unit of Microsoft, saw its hiring rate fall 5.4% month over month in June on a seasonally adjusted basis, the lowest level since December 2021, according to new data released on Friday. On an annual basis, the employment platform’s hiring rate tumbled 11.9% in June.

LinkedIn’s hiring rate is calculated based on the percentage of the platform’s members who added a new employer to their profile in the same month the new job began divided by the total number of LinkedIn members in the United States.

And we just learned that new vehicle sales during the month of June were depressingly low…

Automakers have now reported their June new vehicle sales, or their Q2 new vehicle sales, for the US, except Tesla, which doesn’t report US sales but only global sales. All automakers, even Toyota, and now even Tesla, are struggling with the ongoing semiconductor shortages, and they started the month of June with desperately low inventories on dealer lots and in transit.

And so new vehicle sales in June plunged by 13.5% from the already horribly beaten-down June 2021, to 1.127 million vehicles, and collapsed by 25% from June 2019, the last decent year in the industry, according to data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis today

It appears that a recession is already here, and the months ahead are going to be really tough.

So I would encourage you to get out of debt.

And I would also encourage you to build up your emergency fund.

This is not a time to fritter away your money on unnecessary things. You want to put yourself in the best position possible to weather the “perfect storm” that is ahead, because things certainly aren’t going to be getting easier from here.

As the economy deteriorates, the frustration of the American people is going to get deeper and deeper.

Needless to say, that isn’t good news for Joe Biden.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, 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 digital copies as gifts through Amazon 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 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 ask Jesus to be your Lord and Savior today.

5 Major Trends To Watch For During The Second Half Of 2022

July 5, 2022July 5, 2022 by Michael

Can you believe that it is the second half of 2022 already? I don’t know about you, but to me it seems like time goes by faster with each passing year. Perhaps that is just because I am getting older. In any event, the first six months of 2022 are already in the tank. During those six months, the largest land war in Europe since World War II has erupted, inflation has spiraled out of control all over the world, we have plunged into the worst energy crisis since the 1970s, a horrifying bird flu pandemic has killed tens of millions of turkeys and chickens in the U.S. alone, the worst monkeypox outbreak in history has begun, the S&P 500 had the worst start to a year since 1970, and global leaders have been relentlessly warning us that we are heading into an “unprecedented” planetary food crisis. Unfortunately, I expect the second half of 2022 to be even worse.

Recently, I have been finding myself using the word “accelerate” a lot in my discussions with other people. Global events have certainly accelerated during the first half of this year, and I am convinced that they will accelerate even more during the second half.

In particular, I believe that things will really start getting crazy once summer is over.

Let me give you a few areas that I will be focusing on in the months ahead. The following are 5 trends to watch for during the second half of 2022…

#1 Economic Shaking

Obviously things have not gone well economically during the first half of this year. Inflation is raging all over the globe, and economic activity is slowing down everywhere that you look. Based on the latest reading from the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model, it appears that the U.S. economy has already plunged into a recession. I expect the U.S. economy to continue to deteriorate as we move toward the end of 2022, but I am actually far more concerned about economic conditions in Europe.

The war in Ukraine has hit European economies really hard, and now many of them are potentially facing very serious shortages of natural gas this winter. The EUR/USD is rapidly approaching parity, and this is something that I have been anticipating for years. Once the EUR/USD drops below parity, I think that the dominoes in Europe are going to start falling fairly rapidly.

Meanwhile, I expect inflation rates to remain elevated all over the planet, and this is going to continue to cause tremendous problems.

#2 Widespread Famines

The head of the UN has publicly warned us that we are moving into an “unprecedented global hunger crisis”, and people are already starting to drop dead from starvation in some parts of eastern Africa.

Sadly, I believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Even before the war in Ukraine started, we were already headed into a major food crisis thanks to the soaring price of fertilizer and extremely bizarre global weather patterns. Now the war in Ukraine has reduced the flow of agricultural exports from one of the key breadbaskets in the world to just a trickle. At the same time, food production is going to come in well below expectations all over the planet due to a variety of factors that I have been documenting on my websites.

Food prices have already risen very aggressively, but the biggest problem will be the food that is not grown in the months ahead.

There simply is not going to be enough food for everyone, and that is going to cause enormous societal stress all over the globe in late 2022 and beyond.

#3 More War

The conflict in Ukraine has become extremely bitter and extremely bloody. Unfortunately, it appears that it is not going to end any time soon.

I would love to see a peaceful resolution to the war, because I think that is what would be best for everyone. But the president of Ukraine does not want to negotiate even though his government is losing more territory with each passing day.

So this horrible war will just keep going month after month, and the U.S. just keeps getting more deeply involved. Needless to say, at some point this proxy war between the U.S. and Russia could evolve into a shooting war between our two nations, and that is a scenario that we should be working very hard to avoid.

On the other side of the globe, I believe that China is planning on invading Taiwan while Joe Biden is still in office. They have seen how powerless he has been to stop the Russians, and I think that they are convinced that they have a window of opportunity to “reunify” with Taiwan by force.

But I actually think that another major war will start first.

The IAEA is now telling us that Iran “possesses enough fissile material to construct a nuclear bomb”, and that is a threshold that Israel always said that they would never allow the Iranians to cross.

Israel and Iran are already engaged in a “shadow war”, but I am entirely convinced that it will soon escalate into a full-blown regional conflict.

It may begin in a way that you might not expect, but one way or another it is going to happen.

Hopefully it will not erupt during the second half of this year, but the clock is definitely ticking.

#4 Pestilences

We already have COVID. In fact, they are now telling us that the worst version of the disease that we have seen so far is now circulating widely in the United States.

We are also dealing with a nightmarish bird flu pandemic which has killed tens of millions of our chickens and our turkeys.

On top of everything else, the number of monkeypox cases continues to rise at an exponential rate.

But I believe that more outbreaks are on the way.

We have entered an era when mad scientists all over the globe are monkeying around with the deadliest bugs that mankind has ever known.

And as time moves along, I believe that bad actors will increasingly use diseases that have been cooked up in labs as weapons.

#5 Geophysical Shaking

Let’s just call this one a hunch.

Unlike the first four areas that I have discussed, geophysical events have not made a lot of headlines lately.

Yes, there have been unusual earthquakes in diverse places such as South Carolina, and the sun has been behaving strangely in recent days, but overall things have been relatively quiet.

Unfortunately, I expect that to change.

If you disagree with me, that is perfectly fine. Let’s just watch and see how things play out.

Two years ago I tried to give everyone a big picture overview of what was coming, and since that time so many of the things that I listed have either happened or have started to happen.

We really have entered a “perfect storm”, and those that are still waiting for life to go back to “normal” are going to be bitterly disappointed.

If you always thought that it would be wonderful to live during one of the most important times in human history, you are about to get your wish.

What was once unthinkable will soon become reality, and nothing will ever be the same again.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

Most Young Adults Do Not Know Why We Celebrate July 4th

July 4, 2022July 4, 2022 by Michael

Do you know what we celebrate on July 4th? For most of my readers, such a question would be an insult because the answer is obvious. July 4th was the day that we officially declared our independence from the British. The Continental Congress actually voted in favor of independence on July 2nd, and then on July 4th the Declaration of Independence was formally adopted. Every year, the Declaration of Independence is read during 4th of July celebrations all over the country, and it turns out that this yearly reminder is greatly needed. According to one recent survey, most members of Generation Z do not know who the United States declared independence from in 1776…

As most elementary school students could tell you, July 4th commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 — signaling the nation’s freedom from British rule. However, the poll found two in three young adults in Gen Z don’t know who America declared its independence from.

In fact, one in three Gen Zers think July 4th celebrates America’s independence from the Native Americans!

Overall, less than 58 percent of all respondents correctly answered that America gained its freedom from Great Britain. Nearly eight percent said “Europe.” Over eight percent said “South America” and more than 12 percent chose “none of the above!”

Isn’t that sad?

When I was growing up, public schools were in rough shape but we were still taught the basics about our history.

These days, many of our young people are only taught an extremely warped view of American history if they are taught it at all.

As a result, most members of Generation Z don’t even know what July 4th is all about at this point.

In many of my articles I tend to rant about our rapidly decaying culture, because it truly is a national crisis.

Once upon a time, our culture pumped out the finest young people on the entire planet, but now we are mass producing freaks that have had their minds greatly twisted by the abhorrent “popular culture” that dominates our society today.

The young male that decided to shoot up a 4th of July parade in Highland Park on Monday is a perfect example. He got up on a rooftop and just started shooting at random targets. As a result, at least six people are dead and at least two dozen have been wounded…

Multiple law enforcement agencies launched a massive manhunt Monday evening for the gunman whose shooting rampage left six people dead and at least two dozen injured Monday at a Fourth of July parade in this affluent suburb north of Chicago.

Authorities identified a person of interest as Robert “Bobby” E. Crimo, 22, who is believed to be driving a 2010 silver Honda Fit. He was described as a white male with dark hair and considered armed and dangerous.

You can watch some video of the shooting right here. He was just randomly firing into the crowd, and it appears that he was motivated by a deep hatred for certain types of people.

His social media profiles reveal that he is a radical leftist that absolutely loathes Republicans. Needless to say, most of those that march in parades on July 4th tend to be on the right of the political spectrum, and that is probably why he chose such a parade as his target.

And like so many young people that end up choosing violent lifestyles, he was very deep into rap culture. In fact, he was a rapper himself…

The suspect in the shooting deaths of six people at a July 4th parade in the affluent Highland Park suburb of Chicago has been identified as 22-year-old Robert ‘Bobby’ Crimo III also known as Awake the Rapper.

The lyrics of his “songs” are very disturbing. In one, there is a line is which he states that “I know what I have to do”…

Crimo is from of the Highland Park area. In one song, the suspect wrote: ‘My actions will be valiant and my thought is unnecessary, I know what I have to do, I know what’s in it, not only for me, but for everyone else.’

Of course the music videos that he produced are teeming with violent imagery…

One of his music videos, for the song “Toy Soldier,” features crude, stick-figure-like animation of a man firing a long gun at people and later lying face-down in a pool of blood after apparently being shot by police. The accompanying lyric is: “I just want to scream/F*ck this world/Livin’ the dream.”

He also has an IMDb page that lists him as the writer, director, composer, producer and actor in a pair of music videos. In one, he is rapping on a set made to resemble a small classroom. He is seated at a desk and reaches into his backpack; the screen goes dark, and a gunshot-like sound is heard. When the video returns, he is on his knees and falls to the floor. Maniacal laughter is heard, he drops shell casings from his hands and rubs against an American flag.

There are photos of him all over social media right now, but the truth is that he didn’t have to turn out this way.

If he had been raised differently, educated differently and had never been exposed to rap culture he would have been a completely different person.

If we put garbage into the minds of our kids, we are going to get garbage out.

You may not want to hear that, but that is the truth.

We are the biggest reason why America is in such an advanced state of decline.

As I detail in all of my books, we are literally committing national suicide and most of the population doesn’t seem to care.

When I was growing up, being an American still meant something.

But now a recent Gallup poll discovered that the percentage of us that are “extremely proud” to be Americans has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded…

The 38% of U.S. adults who say they are “extremely proud” to be American is the lowest in Gallup’s trend, which began in 2001. Still, together with the 27% who are “very proud,” 65% of U.S. adults express pride in the nation. Another 22% say they are “moderately proud,” while 9% are “only a little” and 4% “not at all” proud.

And even though they currently have their guy in the White House, Democrats are less likely to be “extremely proud” to be Americans than anyone else…

Republicans’ pride in being American has consistently outpaced Democrats’ and independents’ since 2001 and does so today. However, Republicans’ extreme national pride (58%) is now at its lowest point in the trend. Independents’ extreme pride, at 34%, is likewise the lowest on record for the group.

After hitting a 22% low point in 2019, Democrats’ extreme pride rose to 31% in 2021 at the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, but it is down this year to 26%.

Our country is dying.

They keep telling us that young people are our future, but if that is the case we are in really big trouble.

We desperately need a national cultural revival, but right now we continue to run away from the values that this nation was founded upon as rapidly as we can.

When will enough be enough?

What will it take for the American people to finally wake up?

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

We Are Witnessing A Stunning Breakdown Of Law And Order, And The Overwhelmed Police Seem Powerless To Stop It

July 3, 2022July 3, 2022 by Michael

This country is not the same place that it was ten years ago. In fact, it is not even close to the same place that it was five years ago. Violent crime is out of control in many of our major cities, and there aren’t enough police to handle it all. So in many cases a police officer literally never shows up when someone reports a serious crime. Unfortunately, the number of serious crimes just keeps going up. In 2020, we witnessed the worst spike in violent crime in U.S. history, but 2021 was supposed to be a year when rates of violent crime started going back down. Of course that didn’t happen, and now 2022 is on pace to be even worse than either 2020 or 2021…

Violent crimes are on the rise in six of America’s major cities and set to outpace the already historic levels of 2021 violent crime.

Baltimore, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and New York City are all on pace to break their 2021 levels of violent crime halfway through this year, with the nation’s largest city leading the group, according to crime data reviewed by Fox News.

At this point, violent crime is up 25.8 percent in New York City compared to the first half of last year.

That is staggering.

Of course New York City still has a way to go before it gets as bad as Chicago.

In the Windy City, there are hundreds of thousands of “high-priority emergency service calls” each year, and last year there were no police available to respond to those calls 52 percent of the time…

New data uncovered by Wirepoints through public records requests to the Chicago Police Department (CPD) reveal that in 2021 there were 406,829 incidents of high-priority emergency service calls for which there were no police available to respond.

That was 52 percent of the 788,000 high-priority 911 service calls dispatched in 2021.

So if you are the victim of a violent crime in Chicago, your odds of having a police officer available to help you are about the same as guessing a coin flip correctly.

The following is a partial list of “high-priority emergency service calls” for which no police officer was available in 2021…

14,955 – assaults in progress.
17,828 – batteries in progress.
16,350 – person with a gun.
5,210 – person with a knife.
12,787 – shots fired (reports from people, not the city’s automated “Shotspotter”)
1,352 – person shot.
887 – person stabbed.
14,265 – domestic battery.

Despite numbers such as these, there are lots of people out there that are relentlessly calling for the police to be “defunded”.

Do they want total anarchy?

Because that is what would happen.

Our streets are already bad enough. As you can see from this video, police in Chicago are having a really difficult time even protecting themselves at this point.

But Chicago actually doesn’t have the highest murder rate in the nation.

That honor goes to New Orleans…

It’s no secret that New Orleans struggles with violent crime, but new statistics paint a grim picture of the Crescent City being on pace to be the murder capital of the United States if trends don’t change in 2022.

According to data from AH Datalytics, compiled using the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, New Orleans has a per capita year-to-date homicide rate of 72 per 100,000 residents. The next three U.S. cities behind New Orleans are Birmingham with a per capita homicide rate of 59 per 100,000 residents and Baltimore and St. Louis, each with a per capita homicide rate of 58 per 100,000 residents.

So far this year, the murder rate in New Orleans is up 44 percent.

But the corporate media is trying to convince us that all of this is perfectly “normal”, aren’t they?

Do you believe them?

One man that will never be fooled is World War II veteran Carl Spurlin Deke. He just turned 100 years old on June 29th, and when he was interviewed by a local news outlet he boldly declared that the U.S. “is going to hell in a handbasket”…

Deke’s gratitude for his life quickly turned into an emotional confession about his concern about the entitlement and ungrateful grievance erupting from younger generations saying, “People don’t realize what they have. They b*tch about it. And then nowadays, I am so upset because the things we did, the things we fought for, and the boys that died for it, it’s all going down the drain.” Deke began weeping as he added “Our country is going to hell in a handbasket. We haven’t got the country we had when I was raised, not at all.”

The 100-year-old WWII vet cried for those growing up in America today saying, “Nobody will have the opportunity I had. It’s just not the same. That’s not what our boys, that’s not what they died for.”

Sadly, he is 100 percent correct.

We are in an advanced state of decline, and it is getting worse with each passing day.

If things are this bad now, what will this country look like once economic conditions deteriorate quite a bit more?

Previous generations of young Americans were equipped to handle adversity.

This generation of young Americans is not.

The thin veneer of civilization that we all used to be able to take for granted is steadily disappearing, and our society is evolving into a horror show that would have been unrecognizable to previous generations.

If we would have done things differently, we could have gotten much different results.

Our choices have consequences, and now most of our major cities are being transformed into crime-infested hellholes right in front of our eyes.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

Are You Willing To Suffer Through A Recession For The Good Of “The Liberal World Order”?

July 1, 2022July 1, 2022 by Michael

How much are you willing to sacrifice for “the future of the liberal world order”? As you will see below, the Biden administration is trying to convince us that supporting the “liberal world order” is far more important than any short-term economic pain that we are experiencing right now. So are you willing to pay ridiculously high gas prices for the foreseeable future and suffer through a very serious economic downturn in order to put pressure on Vladimir Putin and Russia? Some Americans would be willing to do that, but most would not.

On Friday, we learned that the U.S. economy is heading in the wrong direction a lot quicker than most of the “experts” had anticipated. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model is currently projecting that economic growth for the second quarter of 2022 will be negative 2.1 percent…

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2022 is -2.1 percent on July 1, down from -1.0 percent on June 30. After this morning’s Manufacturing ISM Report On Business from the Institute for Supply Management and the construction report from the US Census Bureau, the nowcasts of second-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth and real gross private domestic investment growth decreased from 1.7 percent and -13.2 percent, respectively, to 0.8 percent and -15.2 percent, respectively.

U.S. GDP growth was negative during the first quarter, and if U.S. GDP growth is negative again in the second quarter that will mean that we are already in a recession right now.

The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model should be taken very seriously, because it has a very strong track record of accuracy…

“GDPNow has a strong track record, and the closer we get to July 28th’s release [of the initial Q2 GDP estimate] the more accurate it becomes,” wrote Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research.

If it is confirmed later this month that we are already in a recession, it won’t exactly be a surprise, but the good news is that so far this new economic downturn is not that severe.

Unfortunately, we continue to see more signs that things will soon get much worse.

The pace of layoffs is really starting to accelerate and this is especially true in the tech industry.

At this point, even Facebook is looking to thin the ranks…

In addition to the hiring freeze, Zuckerberg also noted the company was leaving some vacant positions at the company unfilled and “turning up the heat” on performance management to weed out staffers who are unable to meet certain KPIs.

“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said, adding, “Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me.”

Meanwhile, we are seeing Americans cut back on their spending at a frightening pace.

In fact, one recent survey discovered that a whopping 83 percent of all Americans have “slashed personal spending due to soaring prices”…

Provident Bank, based in New Jersey, found that 83% of respondents slashed personal spending due to soaring prices of food and gasoline, with 23% indicating they had to make “drastic changes” to their spending for financial survival.

According to the survey results of 600 adults, 10.5% of respondents eliminated all non-essential purchases, and nearly 72% said they made at least some changes to personal travel habits.

And Wall Street seems to have finally gotten the message that very hard times are ahead.

The first half of 2022 was the worst first half of a year for the S&P 500 since 1970, and the index has now plunged into bear market territory…

This all came a day after the S&P 500 posted a more than 16% quarterly loss – its biggest one-quarter fall since March 2020. For the first half, the broader market index dropped 20.6% for its largest first-half decline since 1970. It also tumbled into bear market territory, down more than 21% from a record high set early January.

The Biden administration is openly admitting that more economic suffering is on the way, but we are being told that it is necessary.

On Wednesday, CNN interviewed a key economic adviser to Joe Biden named Brian Deese, and what Deese said during that interview is making headlines all over the globe…

CNN anchor Victor Blackwell interviewed Deese on Thursday and cited that Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Wednesday the war between Russia and Ukraine could be a “grinding struggle” for years.

Blackwell said, “I think everybody understands why this is happening, but is it sustainable? What do you say to those families who say, listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years? This is not sustainable.”

Deese – who was formerly the global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock – replied, “What we heard from the president today was about the stakes. This is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm.”

No thank you.

I don’t want anything to do with a “liberal world order”, and I am sure that most of you don’t either.

In the old days they called it a “new world order”, but that phrase now has so many negative connotations to it that they decided to come up with something new.

Will someone please tell them that “liberal world order” is even worse?

These guys really stink at branding.

Why do we even need to have a “world order” in the first place?

Why can’t we just try to get along with everyone instead of trying to force our twisted values on the entire planet?

I really wish that the U.S. and Russia would have just left Ukraine alone and would have allowed them to determine their own fate.

Needless to say, that was never going to happen, and now the U.S. and Russia are engaged in a horrifying proxy war and countless Ukrainians are being sacrificed like pawns on a chessboard.

If both sides continue to escalate this conflict, it could ultimately bring us to the brink of nuclear war.

But at least we will be supporting “the future of the liberal world order”, and isn’t that what is really important?

Many of us have been relentlessly warning about where all of this foolishness will eventually lead us, but most of the population doesn’t want to listen.

Sadly, many will just continue to support “the current thing” no matter what the consequences are.

The first half of 2022 has been full of surprises, but I am expecting global events to accelerate even more during the second half of this year.

So hold on to your hats, because I believe that things are about to start getting really, really crazy out there.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

Rationing Has Already Started In Europe As The Entire Globe Plunges Into A Horrific Economic Nightmare

June 29, 2022June 29, 2022 by Michael

If countries in Europe are already beginning to ration certain things due to “supply problems”, how long will it be before it starts happening in the United States? Up until the past couple of years, many of us in the western world always considered shortages to be something that only “unsophisticated” poor countries on the other side of the planet had to deal with. But the last couple of years have shown us that painful shortages can happen to wealthy countries in the western world too. At first we were told that they were “just temporary”, but the months went by and we just kept having more shortages. In fact, in 2022 “supply problems” have become so serious that many supermarkets in Europe have been forced to strictly ration essential items at various times. For example, it was being reported that due to the war in Ukraine flour, sunflower oil and sugar were all being rationed by stores in Greece…

After limiting the sale of some flours and sunflower oil online, Greek supermarkets are turning to rationing the sale of sugar as well, now including in their stores, over supply problems.

The AB Vassilopoulos is setting a maximum limit on the purchase of all brands of corn and sunflower oil and of flour per customer while Mymarket put a ceiling on sunflower oil purchases and Sklavenitis has added sugar to the rationed sales of corn oil through its online store, with a maximum of four packs, the products in high demand from restaurants, some of which said they have to stop selling french fries and other fried foods.

Over the past few months we have seen similar measures implemented in other major European nations as well. For example, the war in Ukraine prompted some pretty severe rationing in Spain…

Sporadic shortages of products like eggs, milk, and other dairy products also hit Spain since the war in Ukraine began. And major supermarkets including Mercadona and Makro began rationing sunflower oil earlier this month.

Now, stores will temporarily be allowed to limit “the number of goods that can be bought by a client,” according to information in the Official State Gazette published on Wednesday.

Looking forward, natural gas rationing is the next big thing that many people in Europe are talking about. The flow of Russian natural gas into Europe has been cut back, and it appears that this may soon cause widespread rationing in Italy…

Italy may start rationing natural-gas consumption to certain industrial giants, after Russia’s Gazprom halved supplies on Friday.

On the weekend, the newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that the Italian government and energy industry would meet Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss the crisis, with the likely outcome being the introduction of a state of alert under the country’s gas emergency protocol.

And CNN is reporting that Germany is “one step closer to rationing supplies” now that Russia has decided to reduce the flow of natural gas going to that country…

Europe’s biggest economy is now officially running short of natural gas and is escalating a crisis plan to preserve supplies as Russia turns off the taps.

Germany on Thursday activated the second phase of its three-stage gas emergency program, taking it one step closer to rationing supplies to industry — a step that would deliver a huge blow to the manufacturing heart of its economy.

Of course there are other parts of the globe that are dealing with problems that are far, far more serious than what Europe is facing right now.

As I discussed in an article that I posted earlier this week, significant numbers of people are starting to literally drop dead from starvation in portions of eastern Africa. Global food supplies just keep getting tighter, and the head of the UN is openly telling us that the world is heading into an “unprecedented global hunger crisis”.

So if you have plenty of food to eat tonight, you should be thankful.

Here in the United States, economic conditions are deteriorating fairly rapidly, and most Americans are completely and totally unprepared for any sort of a major economic downturn. Earlier today, I came across yet another survey that shows that about 60 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck…

“We find that consumers in all income brackets — including those who make more than $100,000 annually — are living paycheck to paycheck. PYMNTS’ research finds that 61% of U.S. consumers were living paycheck to paycheck in April 2022, marking a 9 percentage point increase from 52% in April 2021, meaning that approximately three in five U.S. consumers devote nearly all of their salaries to expenses with little to nothing left over at the end of the month.”

So what is going to happen when those people start losing their jobs in large numbers?

Already, we have seen the number of tech layoffs greatly accelerate over the last couple of months.

Sadly, the layoffs will get much worse in the months ahead.

And as inflation continues to systematically eat away at our standard of living, Americans are turning to credit cards at a record pace…

As Americans grapple with the highest inflation in 40 years, the number of new credit cards have surged as more Americans rely on them to keep up with high prices. According to a recent report from the Federal Reserve, revolving credit (credit cards and lines of credit) increased by 19.6% from the previous year to $1.103 trillion.

Going into credit card debt is not a solution.

At best, it can buy you a little bit of time.

And it is especially a bad idea to go into credit card debt as we plunge into a recession.

At this point, almost everyone realizes that things are going to get bad. According to one recent poll, a whopping 85 percent of all Americans believe that the U.S. is “headed in the wrong direction”…

The national dissatisfaction is bipartisan. Most Americans, 85%, say the country is headed in the wrong direction. A majority of Republicans have been unhappy with the direction of the country since Biden’s election. Democrats had been positive about how things were going, but now 78% say the country is headed in the wrong direction.

I was astounded to see that 78 percent of Democrats believe that the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction with a Democrat in the White House.

I have never seen a number like that ever before.

But this is just another indication that the hour is late and that things are about to start getting really crazy out there.

For the moment, life is still at least somewhat normal in the western world.

Sadly, it won’t stay that way for long, and so I would recommend using your time wisely.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

The Most Optimistic Woman On Wall Street Now Says That The U.S. Economy Has Entered A Recession

June 28, 2022June 28, 2022 by Michael

Even the most wild optimists are starting to sound like “doom and gloomers”. In fact, even the most optimistic woman on Wall Street is now telling us that the U.S. economy is in a recession right now. At one time, Cathie Wood seemed like she could do no wrong. Many of her wildly optimistic stock predictions kept coming true, and she gained hordes of Internet followers that hung on her every word. In 2020, her ARK Innovation fund outperformed the S&P 500 by a very wide margin, and pundits such as Jim Cramer were calling her a “genius”…

In 2020, Wood’s predictions appeared to be on their way to coming true. She was riding high atop the Fed-driven bull market: Her ARK Innovation fund, often known by its ticker as ARKK, returned some 157 percent during that first year of the pandemic, compared to just 18 percent for the S&P 500 as a whole. It was a legendary performance that drew accolades from various market watchers, including CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who in February of last year tweeted, “Cathie Wood is a genius.”

But these days Cathie Wood sounds like she could be writing for The Economic Collapse Blog. The value of her ARK Innovation fund is down 67 percent over the past year, and she just did an interview with CNBC in which she stated that she believes that the U.S. economy has already plunged into a recession…

Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood said Tuesday that the U.S. is already in an economic downturn, and she admitted that she underestimated the severity and lasting power of inflation.

“We think we are in a recession,” Wood said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Tuesday. “We think a big problem out there is inventories… the increase of which I’ve never seen this large in my career. I’ve been around for 45 years.”

Of course she is far from alone.

Economist Stephen Moore also believes that the U.S. economy has entered a recessionary period…

Economist Stephen Moore warned on Monday that the United States is already in a “soft recession,” noting that the “real question” is now whether the Federal Reserve can achieve a soft landing.

Moore, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, provided the insight on “Varney & Co.” Monday, reacting to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers contradicting President Biden on Sunday by saying that a recession was “almost inevitable” in the next two years.

Peter Schiff is even more pessimistic.

In fact, he is using the word “crash” to describe what is ahead for our economy…

Stockbroker Peter Schiff, the chief economist and global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, went a step further a couple of weeks ago by tweeting that most citizens have given up on the thought of a soft landing for the economy after the Fed’s interest rate hikes and now expect a harder fall.

“The only landing possible is a crash, where everyone on board dies,” Schiff tweeted. “That’s why the Fed won’t even attempt to land and give up its pretend inflation fight.”

Sadly, all three of them are correct.

At the moment, what we are currently experiencing could definitely be described as a “soft recession”, and it will inevitably get a whole lot worse.

And U.S. consumers certainly are not hopeful about the future at this point. On Friday, we learned that U.S. consumer confidence has now dropped to the lowest level ever recorded…

A closely followed University of Michigan survey released Friday found that US consumer sentiment hit a new record low in June -— the lowest recorded level since the university started collecting the data 70 years ago.

The June index saw a 14.4% drop since May as consumers became increasingly alarmed about inflation. About 79% of those consumers said they expected bad times for business conditions in the upcoming year, the highest level for that metric since 2009.

Just think about that for a moment.

In 70 years, U.S. consumers have never been more pessimistic than they are right now.

That is incredible.

Unfortunately, most consumers are also highly vulnerable.

One recent survey found that 58 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. So when harder times come and many start losing their jobs, a lot of them are going to be in financial trouble very rapidly.

The pace at which things are now changing really is breathtaking.

Exactly one year ago, it seemed like the U.S. economy was riding high and stock prices would keep going up forever.

But now it appears that the first half of 2022 will end up being the worst first half of a year for the stock market since 1970…

Stocks are about to turn in the worst first half in fifty years when the second quarter wraps on Thursday as inflation sits at a 40-year high.

The S&P 500, the broadest measure of stocks, is down nearly 18% this year the worst since 1970, as tracked by Dow Jones Market Data Group. That makes 2022 the fifth-worst half performance on record.

Trillions upon trillions of dollars of paper wealth has already been wiped out, and we continue to get more bad economic news with each passing day.

And now that the Federal Reserve has decided to foolishly raise rates just as an economic downturn is picking up speed, there is no hope that things will turn around any time soon.

The reckless optimists on Wall Street didn’t see this coming in advance. If Cathie Wood had understood which direction things were about to go, her fund would not be down 67 percent over the past year.

But of course there are countless others on Wall Street that have been hit extremely hard as well.

The end of a party can often come very abruptly. In this case, many investors that didn’t get out in time are now feeling an extraordinary amount of pain.

Unfortunately, a lot more pain is coming for Wall Street and for the economy as a whole.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

Global Famine Is Not Just A Theoretical Scenario Anymore

June 27, 2022June 27, 2022 by Michael

The head of the United Nations just warned that we are heading into an “unprecedented global hunger crisis”, and people are already dropping dead of starvation in Africa. For months I have been documenting the signs that severe food shortages were on the way, and now they have begun. Of course there are many reasons why we are facing such a dire situation. Weather patterns have gone completely haywire all over the planet, the COVID pandemic has played havoc with global supply chains, and the war in Ukraine is greatly restricting the flow of agricultural resources out of one of the key breadbaskets in the entire world. Unfortunately, what we have experienced so far is just the tip of the iceberg.

On Friday, UN chief Antonio Guterres publicly warned that there will be an “unprecedented global hunger crisis”…

The world faces the prospect of a mass starvation “catastrophe” driven by unprecedented food shortages, U.N. chief Antonio Guterres warned Friday.

Guterres pointed to the conflict in Ukraine as exacerbating disruptions caused by “climate change, the coronavirus pandemic and inequality” to produce an “unprecedented global hunger crisis” already affecting hundreds of millions of people.

According to Google, “unprecedented” means “never done or known before”.

In other words, Guterres is saying that what we are heading into will be unlike anything that any of us have ever seen.

And he is also openly admitting that 2023 “could be even worse” than 2022…

“There is a real risk that multiple famines will be declared in 2022,” he said in a video message to officials from dozens of countries gathered in Berlin. “And 2023 could be even worse.”

Actually, I think that it is safe to say that 2023 will definitely be worse than 2022 based on the information that we currently have.

Of course things have already gotten really bad in some parts of the globe. In Somalia, one deeply suffering mother has already lost four of her children to starvation in 2022…

No mother should have to lose her child. Owliyo Hassan Salaad has watched four die this year. A drought in the Horn of Africa has taken them, one by one.

Now she cradles her frail and squalling 3-year-old, Ali Osman, whom she carried on a 90-kilometer (55-mile) walk from her village to Somalia’s capital, desperate not to lose him too. Sitting on the floor of a malnutrition treatment center filled with anxious mothers, she can barely speak about the small bodies buried back home in soil too dry for planting.

That is one of the saddest things that I have read in a very long time.

If reading that doesn’t make you incredibly sad, you should check to see if you still have a heart.

What is even more tragic is that countless others will soon starve to death in Somalia, and conditions have also greatly deteriorated in Ethiopia and Kenya…

More than 200,000 people in Somalia face “catastrophic hunger and starvation, a drastic increase from the 81,000 forecast in April,” a joint statement by U.N. agencies said Monday, noting that a humanitarian response plan for this year is just 18% funded.

Somalia isn’t alone. In Ethiopia’s drought-affected regions, the number of children treated for the most severe malnutrition — “a tip of the crisis” — jumped 27% in the first quarter of this year compared to last year, according to UNICEF. The increase was 71% in Kenya, where Doctors Without Borders reported at least 11 deaths in a single county’s malnutrition treatment program earlier this year.

I have always warned that it would be the poorest parts of the globe that would be hit the hardest.

But as the food shortages intensify, western nations will feel the pain as well.

The biggest problem is all the food that is not going to be grown this year. Many fertilizer prices have approximately tripled from a year ago, and that is going to dramatically impact agricultural production all over the planet…

Over the coming months, a major challenge will be access to fertilizers which may impact food production across many crops in different regions. Fertilizer prices surged in March, up nearly 20% since January 2022 and almost three times higher compared to a year ago. Russia and Belarus are major fertilizer exporters, accounting for 38% of potassic fertilizers, 17% of compound fertilizers, and 15% of nitrogenous fertilizers.

Here in the United States, many farmers have gone ahead with normal planting despite the high fertilizer prices, but now extreme drought is ruining crops all over the western half of the nation.

For example, just check out what is happening in Kansas. The following comes from NPR…

ELIZABETH REMBERT, BYLINE: Usually, Kansas is known for its fields of waist-high golden wheat. But this year, the blistering conditions have withered some of the crop into short, patchy straw. Standing in one of his fields in northwest Kansas, Chris Tanner wonders if it’ll even make it through harvest.

CHRIS TANNER: I mean, like, this head down here, there’s going to be nothing in it. It’ll blow out the back of the combine. You can see the seeds kind of exposed there. It’ll shatter out even before we get here.

REMBERT: It’s fields like these leading industry groups to predict a 100 million bushel drop in Kansas’ wheat harvest this year. That’s 30% less than last year’s harvest.

And as I discussed last week, conditions are even worse in Colorado and Texas.

So buckle up and hold on tight, because things will soon start getting really crazy.

Before I end this article, there is one more thing that I wanted to mention. In Oregon, authorities are bracing for an “explosion” of crop-devouring insects…

The Oregon Legislature last year allocated $5 million to assess the problem and set up a Mormon cricket and grasshopper “suppression” program. An additional $1.2 million for the program was approved earlier this month.

It’s part of a larger effort by state and federal authorities in the U.S. West to deal with an explosion of grasshoppers and Mormon crickets that has hit from Montana to Nevada. But some environmental groups oppose the programs, which rely on the aerial spraying of pesticides across large swaths of land.

This is a problem that has really been growing in recent years, and one rancher that was interviewed described the outbreaks that he has experienced as “truly biblical”…

Rancher Skye Krebs said the outbreaks have been “truly biblical.”

“On the highways, once you get them killed, then the rest of them come,” he explained. Mormon crickets are cannibalistic and will feast on each other, dead or alive, if not satiated with protein.

It seems like we get more bad news about U.S. food production with each passing day.

Unfortunately, most Americans still don’t seem to grasp what is happening.

If farmers and ranchers don’t produce our food, there won’t be anything to buy at the grocery store.

We have never faced anything like what we are dealing with now, and this crisis is only going to intensify in the months ahead.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

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