Global Supply Chain Crisis

The Global Energy Crisis Is Going To Take “The Everything Shortage” To An Entirely New Level

This is going to be one tough winter.  On top of everything else we are facing, a very alarming energy crisis is rapidly growing all over the world.  Supplies of natural gas and coal are getting tighter by the day, and this is dramatically affecting manufacturing in major exporters such as China.  So that means that less stuff is going to be coming across the ocean in the months ahead, and that means that the shortages in our stores are going to be getting even worse.  This is really happening, and we are going to have to deal with it.

Of course store shelves are already getting pretty bare all around the country.  They are calling it “the everything shortage”, and it has been intensifying with each passing week.

I have so much to talk about that I am not even sure where to begin, and so I am just going to start with the the Bigley Piggly Wiggly in Charleston, West Virginia.  Store owner Jeff Joseph says that a shortage of Gatorade is one of the biggest issues that he is currently wrestling with…

If you’ve been to the grocery store lately, you may have noticed some of your favorite products aren’t available. At the Bigley Piggly Wiggly in Charleston, WV the section where they keep Gatorade is close to empty.

“Who would think that Gatorade would be a problem to get in the store? But apparently, it is and it is something that we have been wrestling with for quite some time now,” said Jeff Joseph, store owner.

Day after day, I see more local news reports like this.  I just picked this one out because I really like the name of the store.

And my readers continue to send me emails about what conditions are like where they live.  One reader that is located in Pennsylvania was deeply alarmed by a lack of milk and dog food during her last visit to the supermarket…

Yesterday, I was at our Giant supermarket on Linglestown Road a few miles from Harrisburg, PA. It is the largest Giant in the area. I was at the milk section, there were maybe more than 10 empty rows with no milk in them. My husband wanted chocolate milk, they had only one brand. I was looking for dog treats, and found out they moved the aisle, there was not as many brands. They are taking the dog food bags and moving them out to the front of the shelf to make them look full, but there are no bags behind them. We like Arizona canned tea, but I had to settle for a big bottle instead. Canned tea is hard to get. The aisle with the toilet paper and towels was half empty. I wanted some Nutter Butter cookies (like I need them), but they had none.

In southwestern Arkansas, it sounds like things are even worse.  We had been warned that there would be a shortage of toys during this holiday season, and one of my readers says that she is already noticing a huge change…

It is horrifying to walk through a Dollar General Store down here in Southwestern Arkansas. There are bare shelves, the toy aisle, normally flooded this time of year in anticipation of Christmas…there is nothing there, like what should normally be there. Brookshire’s is the premium market down here…they do not have frozen turkeys, and the frozen chicken that we purchased–Tyson chicken—I bought a five-pound flat of drumsticks…there were still feathers on some of the pieces of chicken. I had to wash, pluck, and wow…just wow….what the factories must be like these days is all I’m saying.

We have never seen anything like this before, and the experts are telling us that the months in front of us are going to be even worse.

These days, even big corporate news outlets are constantly running stories about the shortages.  The following is an excerpt from one report that was entitled “America Is Running Out of Everything”…

I visited CVS last week to pick up some at-home COVID-19 tests. They’d been sold out for a week, an employee told me. So I asked about paper towels. “We’re out of those too,” he said. “Try Walgreens.” I drove to a Walgreens that had paper towels. But when I asked a pharmacist to fill some very common prescriptions, he told me the store had run out. “Try the Target up the road,” he suggested. Target’s pharmacy had the meds, but its front area was alarmingly barren, like the canned-food section of a grocery store one hour before a hurricane makes landfall.

In the past, any shortages were always very temporary.

But these shortages aren’t going to go away any time soon.

In fact, that same article that I just quoted openly admitted that “this is the economy now”…

This is the economy now. One-hour errands are now multi-hour odysseys. Next-day deliveries are becoming day-after-next deliveries. That car part you need? It’ll take an extra week, sorry. The book you were looking for? Come back in November. The baby crib you bought? Make it December. Eyeing a new home-improvement job that requires several construction workers? Haha, pray for 2022.

Even the usually optimistic talking heads on television are warning us that the colossal problems that have caused this epic global supply chain crisis are not going to resolved for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, as I noted above, a very frightening global energy crisis threatens to take “the everything shortage” to an entirely new level.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “Natural-Gas Shortage Sets Off Scramble Ahead of Winter” that really freaked a lot of people out.  All over the planet, nations are feverishly trying to secure sufficient supplies of natural gas for the months ahead.  Normally there is a spike of demand in the middle of winter, but at this moment we are nowhere close to that point.  In fact, summer just officially ended a couple of weeks ago.

So if things are this bad already, what are we going to be facing in a few months?

At the same time, a very serious shortage of coal is pushing prices up to absolutely absurd levels…

Australia’s Newcastle thermal coal, a global benchmark, is trading at $202 a metric ton, three times higher than at the end of 2019. Global production of coal, which generates around 40% of the world’s electricity, is about 5% below pre-pandemic levels.

In Europe, the rising prices for coal and other energy resources have hit factory output and driven household energy bills higher. Major coal importers in Asia, including Japan and South Korea, are jostling to secure supplies.

We have never seen an energy crisis this severe in modern times, and it is already having a dramatic impact on manufacturing in China…

In recent weeks, however, officials have begun a much more aggressive rationing program (Figure 1), with factories in much of Guangdong now seeing only 1-2 days per week of power use allowed. Similar situations are reportedly occurring in Jiangsu, Hubei, and Fujian provinces, all major manufacturing regions. As just one example, one of my US-based import customers has reported that a key supplier in Jiangsu is down to a single day per week of power availability. Limited-but-expanded power rationing is also occurring in Zhejiang, Shandong, Liaoning, and other important heavy industrial, chemical, and energy-product hubs.

So what does this mean?

It means that China is going to be exporting a lot less stuff to us, and so our store shelves will continue to get barer and barer.

For more than a decade I have been warning that we should have never allowed ourselves to become so dependent on Chinese manufacturing.  But of course most people didn’t want to listen to “alarmists” like me.

Unfortunately, the truth is now evident to everyone.

The “new normal” is here, and it is going to be exceedingly painful.

Whatever you think that you are going to need for the winter months, go out and get it now.

The shortages are just beginning, and the global economy will never be the same after this.

***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 Snyder 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)  By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe.  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.  During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.

This Is Such A Dangerous Time In Our History

If you feel like global events are about to hit a dramatic turning point, you are definitely not alone.  Lately, I have been hearing from so many people that are feeling such a sense of dread about the days that are ahead of us.  It kinds of reminds me of the waning days of 2019.  If you go back and review my articles and my interviews from that period, you will see that I repeatedly warned that I had such a bad feeling about 2020.  At the time, that didn’t make a lot of sense to some people, because life was still relatively normal.  But then the COVID pandemic came along and the world went completely nuts.  Well, now I am sensing another huge wave of trouble, and countless others are feeling the exact same way.

Normally, I tend to focus my articles on things that just happened in the news.  But today I want to talk about the bigger picture because we have reached such a dangerous time in our history.  The events of the past couple of years have put us on a very alarming trajectory, and I believe that we are rapidly approaching a point of no return.

There are still a lot of people out there that believe that some sort of a magic solution will suddenly be found and life will revert to normal.  Sadly, that isn’t going to happen.  Nobody has a “silver bullet”, and men on white horses are not going to come riding in to save us.

At this moment, the stage is being set for so many of the things that I warned about in Lost Prophecies and 7 Year Apocalypse.  Great natural disasters are occurring all over the planet, extreme weather events are playing havoc with worldwide crop production, global hunger is on the rise, we are facing a supply chain crisis of epic proportions, and I have written numerous articles in recent weeks about the growing shortages that we are witnessing.

Meanwhile, the pandemic continues to rage on, and now we are being told that this virus will be with us indefinitely.  Of course many believe that how national governments have responded to the pandemic has been even worse than the pandemic itself.  We are seeing civil unrest and mass protests all over the globe as ordinary citizens lash out against the alarming rise of authoritarianism all around us.  We have seen so much chaos and death over the past couple of years, and there will be so much more in the years ahead.  Millions upon millions of people have already died, but what we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.

As I discussed a few days ago, this is also a time of wars and rumors of wars.  Needless to say, military conflict will take many of our current problems to an entirely new level.  Sadly, most Americans have absolutely no idea that we are moving toward war even now.

But most Americans can see the product shortages that are growing all around us.  At this point, the supply chain crisis has gotten so bad that the mainstream media can’t stop talking about it.  On a very basic level, our economic infrastructure is breaking down, and this is something that is happening all over the world.

Originally we were told that things would be “getting back to normal” by this point, but now we are being told that the shortages are going to be getting even worse in the months ahead.  Earlier today, I came across a video in which Glenn Beck detailed why he is extremely concerned about this.  I think that Glenn did a really good job of communicating the urgency of the crisis that we are now facing, and I hope that people will share his video with as many people as they can.

There are some that have used the word “hell” to describe the past couple of years, but the truth is that they aren’t even worth comparing to what is still ahead of us.

But no matter what comes along, you can get through this.

I have heard from so many people that are scared about what is to come, and it is okay to be honest about our emotions.  If you truly understand the bigger picture, the gravity of what we are dealing with will definitely weigh on you.  But there is no reason to be afraid.  You were born for such a time as this, and you were placed at this specific moment in human history for a reason.

Since I write about such difficult topics, some people out there have suggested that I must be deeply depressed.  But the truth is that my wife and I are not depressed at all.  We are not on any pills, we don’t have to see any psychologists and we don’t walk around in a state of gloom all the time.

That is because we know who we are, we know where we are going and we understand how the story ends.  All of human history has been building up to a grand crescendo, and we get to be here for it.

There is no other time in all of human history that I would have rather lived than right here, right now.

But if your life is defined by the system that the elite have established, and if what you care about are the material possessions that the system has provided for you, then the years ahead are going to be exceedingly painful for you.

Because the truth is that the system is dying.

Everything that can be shaken will be shaken, and we are going to see horrors that are far beyond what most people would dare to imagine right now.

But for those that are living for the things that really matter, this will be an incredibly exciting time to be alive.

If you have not been paying much attention to global events, now is the time for you to wake up.  So many of the pieces of the puzzle are coming together simultaneously, and so many of the major things that the watchmen have been warning about are on the verge of taking place.

I will have so much more to say about all of this in the days ahead.  Be strong and keep the fire burning, because the times that are approaching are going to greatly challenge all of us.

***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 Snyder 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)  By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe.  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.  During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.