The Economic Collapse

If you think that the food and diesel shortages are bad now, then you will be absolutely horrified by what the globe is experiencing by the end of the year.  All over the planet, food production is being crippled by an unprecedented confluence of factors.  The war in Ukraine, extremely bizarre weather patterns, nightmarish plagues and a historic fertilizer crisis have combined to create a “perfect storm” that isn’t going away any time soon.  As a result, the food that won’t be grown in 2022 will become an extremely severe global problem by the end of this calendar year.  Global wheat prices have already risen by more than 40 percent since the start of 2022, but this is just the beginning.  Meanwhile, we are facing unthinkable diesel fuel shortages in the United States this summer, and as you will see below there are “no plans” to increase refining capacity in this country for the foreseeable future. (Read More...)

It is happening again.  More than a decade ago, we witnessed an absolutely unprecedented “housing bubble” in the United States followed by a horrific crash that resulted in millions of Americans losing their homes and a financial catastrophe on Wall Street that we still talk about today.  But instead of learning our lessons from that disaster, we are repeating history instead.  The “housing bubble” that we are currently experiencing is far larger than the one that burst in 2008, and everyone knew that if mortgage rates rose high enough it could cause the bubble to burst.  Unfortunately, that is precisely what is taking place.  The average 30 year fixed mortgage rate was sitting at 2.67 percent in December 2020, and now it has risen to 5.30 percent.  In case you are bad at math, that means that the average 30 year fixed mortgage rate has roughly doubled, and that is extremely bad news for the housing market. (Read More...)

I have really been struggling to come up with an accurate way of describing the current state of the U.S. economy, because none of the traditional labels seem to apply.  Inflation is out of control, and that normally happens when an economy is overheating.  But of course the U.S. economy is not overheating.  In fact, if U.S. GDP falls once again during the second quarter, that will officially confirm that we are actually in a recession right now.  There are some that have suggested that “stagflation” is a good description of current economic conditions, but the truth is that what we are facing is so much worse than anything that we dealt with during the 1970s. (Read More...)

Just as the western world was accelerating the transition away from traditional forms of energy, the COVID pandemic caused the most epic supply chain crisis in history, and now the largest land war in Europe since World War II has thrown global energy markets into a state of complete and utter chaos.  And if you think that things are bad now, just wait until a huge war erupts in the Middle East.  Energy prices are ridiculously high now, but they will eventually go much higher than this.  Needless to say, skyrocketing energy prices will have a catastrophic impact on worldwide economic conditions during the troubled months and years ahead of us. (Read More...)

A lot of people out there have been waiting for this stock market bubble to implode for a really long time.  Well, the wait is now over.  Stock prices have been falling for months, but what we have witnessed within the past couple of weeks has been absolutely breathtaking.  Trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of paper wealth has been suddenly wiped out, and many investors are panic selling in a desperate attempt to lock in profits before the market completely collapses. (Read More...)

If you think that things are bad now, just wait until we get into the second half of this year.  Global food supplies have already gotten very tight, but it is the food that won’t be produced during this current growing season in the northern hemisphere that will be the real problem.  Worldwide fertilizer prices have doubled or tripled, the war in Ukraine has greatly reduced exports from one of the key breadbaskets of the world, a nightmarish bird flu pandemic is wiping out millions of chickens and turkeys, and bizarre weather patterns are absolutely hammering agricultural production all over the planet.  I have often used the phrase “a perfect storm” to describe what we are facing, but even that phrase really doesn’t seem to do justice to the crisis that we will be dealing with in the months ahead.  The following are 18 signs that food shortages will get a lot worse as we head into the second half of 2022… (Read More...)

Is this “the Big One”?  On Wednesday, I warned that the Federal Reserve had made a “colossal mistake” when it increased its benchmark interest rate by 50 basis points, and it looks like investors on Wall Street fully agree.  We just witnessed one of the largest single day stock market crashes in history, and of course this comes at a time when stock prices had already fallen quite dramatically.  Even before the carnage on Thursday, stocks were off to their worst start to a year in decades.  So will things settle down soon, or is this the beginning of a truly historic stock market collapse? (Read More...)

You don’t raise interest rates when the economy is already falling into a recession.  U.S. GDP contracted during the first quarter of 2022, and if it contracts again in the second quarter of 2022 that will officially confirm that we are already in a recession right now.  Any central banker that would choose to raise interest rates just as a new recession is starting is absolutely nuts.  But the “experts” at the Fed decided to go ahead with a 50 basis point rate hike on Wednesday anyway.  This was the largest rate hike that we have seen since the year 2000, and it appears that more rate hikes are coming later in the year. (Read More...)