Listen to New Rob, and ignore the man on the stage ranting and raving

I am trying to sound the alarm about this as loudly as I can.  The global food crisis just continues to intensify, and things are going to get really bad in 2023.  As you will see below, two-thirds of European fertilizer production has already been shut down, currency problems are causing massive headaches for poor nations that need to import food, global weather patterns continue to be completely crazy, and the bird flu is killing millions upon millions of chickens and turkeys all over the planet.  On top of everything else, the war in Ukraine is going to restrict the flow of agricultural and fertilizer exports from that part of the world for a long time to come, because there is no end to the war in sight.  In essence, we are facing a “perfect storm” for global food production, and that “perfect storm” is only going to get worse in the months ahead.

Global hunger has been on the rise for years, and the UN World Food Program is warning that we are heading for “yet another year of record hunger”…

The world is at risk of yet another year of record hunger as the global food crisis continues to drive yet more people into worsening levels of severe hunger, warns the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in a call for urgent action to address the root causes of today’s crisis ahead of World Food Day on October 16.

The global food crisis is a confluence of competing crises – caused by climate shocks, conflict and economic pressures – that has pushed the number of severely hungry people around the world from 282 million to 345 million in just the first months of 2022. The U.N. World Food Programme scaled up food assistance targets to reach a record 153 million people in 2022, and by mid-year had already delivered assistance to 111.2 million people.

But as I have consistently warned, this is only just the beginning.

Eventually, there will be billions of people that don’t have enough to eat on a regular basis.

In all my years, I have never seen hunger spread so rapidly.  In fact, there are large numbers of people that are now facing starvation in the backyard of the United States…

The United Nations is warning that hunger in one of Haiti’s biggest slums is at catastrophic levels, as gang violence and economic crises push the country to “breaking point”.

Nearly 20,000 people in the capital’s impoverished Cité Soleil area have dangerously little access to food and could face starvation, the UN says,

Across Haiti, almost five million are struggling with malnutrition.

“Haiti is facing a humanitarian catastrophe,” a top UN official said.

But most people in the western world won’t care until they are going hungry themselves.

Unfortunately, that day may be a lot closer than a lot of people ever imagined.

Right now, a whopping two-thirds of all fertilizer production capacity in Europe has already been shut down because of the skyrocketing price of natural gas…

Europe’s fertilizer crunch is deepening with more than two-thirds of production capacity halted by soaring gas costs, threatening farmers and consumers far beyond the region’s borders.

Russia’s squeeze on gas shipments in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine is hurting industries across Europe. But fertilizer companies are being especially affected because gas is both a key feedstock and a source of power for the sector.

There simply will not be enough fertilizer for European farmers in 2023.

And there won’t be enough for everyone else that depends on fertilizer production from Europe.

This is a really big deal, because without fertilizer we would only be able to feed approximately half the planet.

Do you want to volunteer to be among those that don’t get enough food?

Meanwhile, the surging U.S. dollar is causing immense headaches for food importers all over the world…

In Ghana, importers are warning about shortages in the run up to Christmas. Thousands of containers loaded with food recently piled up at ports in Pakistan, while private bakers in Egypt raised bread prices after some flour mills ran out of wheat because it was stranded at customs.

Around the world, countries that rely on food imports are grappling with a destructive combination of high interest rates, a soaring dollar and elevated commodity prices, eroding their power to pay for goods that are typically priced in the greenback. Dwindling foreign-currency reserves in many cases has reduced access to dollars, and banks are slow in releasing payments.

The value of the U.S. dollar has been spiking because the Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates.

When the value of the dollar goes up, poor countries have to pay a lot more for food in their own local currencies.

So the Federal Reserve is actually making the global food crisis worse by hiking rates.

But they are going to keep doing it anyway.

At the same time, global weather patterns continue to go completely haywire.

This summer we witnessed the worst drought in Chinese history, Europe endured the worst drought in 500 years, and the western U.S. continued to suffer through the worst multi-year megadrought in at least 1,200 years.

Needless to say, all of this drought is absolutely devastating agricultural production.

According to the Washington Post, “more than 80 percent of the U.S. is facing troubling dry conditions” right now.  In the middle of the country, this has caused a horrific crisis for barge traffic along the Mississippi River…

The barge industry is quite important. It’s crucial for moving aluminum, petroleum, fertilizer and coal, particularly on the Mississippi River and its tributaries. About 60% of the grain and 54% of the soybeans for U.S. export are moved via the noble barge. Barges touch more than a third of our exported coal as well.

Right now the barge industry — and all of us who depend on its wares — is mired in a crisis. Water levels on the Mississippi River Basin are at its lowest point in more than a decade.

Last week, approximately 2,000 barges were struck at one point.

Sadly, very dry conditions are expected “over the next several weeks”, and so things are not likely to get better any time soon…

Low water levels and dredging shuttered barge traffic heading north and south on the Mississippi last week. At one point, more than 100 towboats and 2,000 barges were stuck waiting. The blocked-off section of the river, between Louisiana and Mississippi, reopened Monday. Traffic is limited to one way, according to Petty Officer Jose Hernandez of the U.S. Coast Guard.

That’s certainly better than zero-way traffic, but the Mississippi is still expected to become even more parched. Lisa Parker, a representative of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, told FreightWaves that drier conditions are expected over the next several weeks. The river is slurping up water reserves right now, Parker added, but those reserves will eventually run out.

As a result of this crisis, rates to move goods by barge have gone through the roof, and we could ultimately see massive amounts of agricultural produce rot before it can get to consumers…

Since many barges are stuck and cannot move at all, barge prices are reportedly hyperinflating. As of this writing, the highest USD per ton price shown is $90.44. Prior to the massive spike, it was under $10 to move a ton of goods.

The vast majority of the now-stranded bean piles and other farm goods were intended for major export terminals in the Gulf of Mexico. While at least some of them appear to be covered and ventilated, how long will they really last before spoiling?

On another note, we continue to see crabs die off at a staggering rate.

In fact, it is now being reported that the winter harvest of snow crab in Alaska has been suspended because the crab population has experienced a catastrophic decline…

Alaska officials have canceled several crab harvests in a conservation effort that sent shock waves through the crabbing industry in the region.

Officials canceled the fall Bristol Bay red king crab harvest and, for the first time on record, are also holding off on the winter harvest of snow crab, according to multiple reports.

The decision comes after stark recent population declines of the animals. Data from an NOAA eastern Bering Sea survey shows a 92% decline in overall snow crab abundance from 2018 to 2021, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game confirmed to USA TODAY. An 83% decline occurred from 2018 to 2022, as some small crab entered the population in 2022, according to the department’s Division of Commercial Fisheries.

And thanks to the global bird flu pandemic, birds continue to die in staggering numbers as well.

If you can believe it, nearly 100 million chickens and turkeys have already been wiped out during this pandemic in the United States and Europe alone, and experts are warning that this pandemic will only intensify now that cold weather is arriving.

Those of you that have been to the grocery store lately already know that egg prices, chicken prices and turkey prices have surged to absolutely crazy levels.  At this point, prices are so high that one recent survey found that one out of every four Americans plans to skip Thanksgiving this year in order to save money…

One in five Americans are unsure if they will be able to cover the costs of Thanksgiving this year, and one in four plan to skip it to save money, a recent Personal Capital survey found.

The state of economic affairs in President Joe Biden’s America is affecting Americans’ holiday plans. According to the survey, one quarter of Americans are planning to skip Thanksgiving this year to save money, and one in five “doubted they would have enough money to cover the costs of Thanksgiving this year.”

More specifically, one-third expect their 2022 Thanksgiving dinner to be “smaller,” and 45 percent, overall, said they are “finically stressed” by Thanksgiving.

Yes, things are already that bad.

But according to Joe Biden, everything is just fine.  In fact, he says that “our economy is strong as hell”…

The comment came during a conversation with a reporter at a Baskin Robbins in Portland, Oregon, who asked the president if he had any worry about the strength of the U.S. dollar amid rising inflation.

With a chocolate chip ice cream cone in his hand, Biden answered: “I’m not concerned about the strength of the dollar. I’m concerned about the rest of the world. Our economy is strong as hell.”

You believe him, don’t you?

Our leaders would have us believe that all of the problems that we are facing right now are just temporary and that a golden new age of peace and prosperity is just around the corner.

But if that is true, why are they so eager to have us eat bugs?

A tremendous amount of time, energy and resources is being put behind a campaign to promote insects as one of the solutions to the rapidly growing global food crisis.

But I don’t plan to eat bugs, and I am sure that you don’t either.

Unfortunately, there isn’t going to be nearly enough food for everyone on the planet in 2023, and millions upon millions of deeply suffering individuals will soon be desperately hungry.

They can push bug eating all they want, but that isn’t going to fix our problems.  Right now, they have absolutely no solutions that will prevent large numbers of people from starving to death during the difficult years that are in front of us.

Earlier this year the Federal Reserve declared war on inflation, and since that time we have seen a series of interest rate hikes that has been absolutely breathtaking.  We knew that this would negatively impact the financial markets, and we have already seen trillions of dollars in asset values wiped out.  We also knew that this would negatively impact the housing market, and right now housing prices are plummeting all over the nation.  But Fed officials assured us that any short-term “pain” would be worth it because inflation would be brought under control.  Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.  In fact, on Thursday we learned that the core consumer price index has just hit “the highest level since 1982”…

A closely watched measure of US consumer prices rose by more than forecast to a 40-year high in September, pressuring the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates even more aggressively to stamp out persistent inflation.

The core consumer price index, which excludes food and energy, increased 6.6% from a year ago, the highest level since 1982, Labor Department data showed Thursday. From a month earlier, the core CPI climbed 0.6% for a second month.

The overall CPI increased 0.4% last month, and was up 8.2% from a year earlier.

The Fed has been repeatedly hitting inflation with an over-sized sledgehammer, and it isn’t working.

Prices just continue to surge higher month after month.

In particular, the price of food is rising at a rate that is extremely alarming…

Prices at the grocery store continued to soar last month, adding even more pressure to shoppers’ wallets.

The food at home index, a proxy for grocery store prices, increased 0.7% in September from the month prior and a stunning 13% over the last year, according to new government data released Thursday.

Fed officials assured us that they had everything under control, but it was just a charade.

Thursday’s report makes it exceedingly clear that the Fed’s plan is failing in a major way…

“This inflation report today was an unmitigated disaster,” wrote Christopher S. Rupkey, chief economist at Fwdbonds, a financial markets research company. “It shows whatever Fed officials are doing, it is just not working.”

So will the Fed change course?

Of course not.

Instead, they are going to give us more of the same.

According to Fox Business, it is being anticipated that another 75 basis point rate hike is on the way in November…

The report will also have significant implications for the Federal Reserve, which has embarked on one of the fastest tightening paths in decades. Policymakers have already approved five straight rate hikes, including three back-to-back 75-basis-point increases, and have shown no signs of slowing down.

Following the hotter-than-expected September inflation report, the central bank is widely expected to approve a fourth straight 75-basis-point increase when policymakers next meet at the beginning of November.

As I warned many months ago, these rate hikes are not going to solve the inflation crisis.

But they will absolutely kill the housing market.

This week, mortgage rates surged close to 7 percent…

Average long-term U.S. mortgage rates reached their highest level in more than 20 years this week and are likely to climb even further as the Federal Reserve has all but promised more rate increases in its battle to tamp down persistent inflation.

Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac reported Thursday that the average key 30-year rate climbed to 6.92 percent from 6.66 percent last week. Some lenders are now even offering rates above 7 percent.

Last year at this time, the rate was 3.05 percent.

If the Federal Reserve keeps hiking rates, that will just push mortgage rates higher and higher.

And that will inevitably push home prices much lower.

In fact, home prices are already starting to come down all across the United States…

A home-price slump taking place across popular housing markets in the Sun Belt and other regions could result in some relative bargains for shrewd homebuyers, according to market data released Monday.

The median home listing price has plunged by more than 10% in Austin, Texas, since June, according to an analysis conducted by Realtor.com. That marked the steepest decline of any city in the US over that period.

If you are a potential homeowner that has been forced out of the market by rising mortgage rates, you could try to rent a place while you wait for home prices to fall.

But thanks to raging inflation, rents are absolutely skyrocketing in many of our largest cities…

The latest numbers were released in Realtor.com’s September report, and showed that median rent across the country as a whole rose 7.8 percent last month, and remained a whopping 25 percent higher than pre-pandemic rents.

The 10 cities with the highest median rent increases last month were Chicago at 23.9 percent, Boston with 19.9 percent, New York with 18.2 percent, Providence with 16.7 percent, Oklahoma City at 13.8 percent, Miami with 13.2 percent, Kansas City at 11.2 percent, San Jose with 10.7 percent, Cleveland with 9.8 percent, and Hartford with 9.6 percent.

I still remember the days when I could rent a nice apartment for 300 dollars a month.

Sadly, those days are long gone.  In fact, one couple in New York recently decided to move out of the city entirely when the rent on their one-bedroom apartment went from $5,000 a month to $7,000 a month…

Last May, Charlotte, 31, and her husband packed up their one-bedroom apartment on Christopher Street after learning the rent would likely skyrocket from $5,000 per month to $7,000. The couple loved living in the West Village, but homeownership was out of reach, even with her job in finance and him being in tech.

They were both working from home, so they could live anywhere. It was time, they decided, to leave New York.

Can you imagine paying $7,000 a month for a one bedroom apartment?

That is nuts!

Unfortunately, our whole system is going crazy at this point.

The great economic meltdown that I warned my readers about for so long has begun, and the months ahead are going to be very painful.

Fed officials will do all they can to fix the giant mess that they have created, but it isn’t going to work.

They have lost control, and everyone can see it.

Halloween Canceled By Woke School Administrators

America is nearly fully collapsed. The American culture is almost fully erased.

Inflation is systematically destroying our standard of living, and the middle class is shrinking a little bit more with each passing day.  The Social Security Administration just released wage statistics for 2021, and the numbers that they have given us are quite stunning.  As you will see below, half of all American workers made less than $3,133 a month last year.  Once upon a time, you could live a very comfortable middle class lifestyle on $3,133 a month.  But thanks to inflation, such a wage now puts you just barely above the poverty level.  The decisions that our leaders have been making are absolutely eviscerating the middle class, and that should deeply trouble all of us.

You can find the new Social Security Administration wage report right here.  The following are some statistics that I pulled out of the report…

-More than 30 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.

-More than 41 percent of all American workers made less than $30,000 last year.

-More than 52 percent of all American workers made less than $40,000 last year.

-More than 62 percent of all American workers made less than $50,000 last year.

These numbers tell us that most Americans are just barely scraping by, but our leaders want us to buy into the illusion that most people are “doing well” these days.

Of course that isn’t even close to the truth.

According to the Social Security Administration, the median wage for 2021 was just $37,586.03…

By definition, 50 percent of wage earners had net compensation less than or equal to the median wage, which is estimated to be $37,586.03 for 2021.

If we were still living in 1980, that would be fine.

But we aren’t in 1980 anymore.

In 2022, the poverty level for a household of five in the United States is $31,040.

That means that a worker in the United States making the median wage would be earning just enough to lift a family of five above the poverty line.

If you divide $37,586.03 by 12, that gives you a median monthly wage of $3,132.17.

For purposes of this article, I will round up and call it $3,133.

Half of all American workers make more than that per month, and half of all American workers make less than that per month.

And it is important to remember that this figure is before taxes are taken out.

Ouch.

Meanwhile, the cost of living continues to spiral out of control.  Recently, the average rent on a single family home in the United States reached $2,495 a month…

Rent prices for single family homes swelled during the first half of 2022, hitting a national average of $2,495 a month — a 13.4% increase compared to the same period in 2021, according to a new report from national real estate brokerage HouseCanary.

If you are only earning $3,133 a month and you have to spend $2,495 a month for rent, that leaves you next to nothing for everything else.

For example, all of us have to eat.

But these days a single shopping cart full of food will easily run you more than 300 dollars.

And that is if you are trying to be really frugal.

Gasoline has also become extremely expensive.

All the way back in 1960, a gallon of gas cost just 31 cents.

Today, gas is approaching 7 dollars a gallon in some parts of California.

I could go on and on with more examples of the rapidly rising cost of living.  Heating bills are expected to soar this winter, health insurance has gotten absurdly expensive, and new vehicles cost so much that most Americans can no longer afford them.

If things are this bad already, what will conditions be like for the middle class as the economy deteriorates in 2023 and beyond?

The worst housing crash since 2008 has now started, the financial markets are on pace for their worst year since 1969, and big companies all over America are starting to lay off people in large numbers.

Alarmingly, some of the biggest layoffs are actually being conducted by the big tech companies.  In fact, we just learned that Microsoft will be laying off approximately 1,000 workers…

Microsoft will lay off about 1,000 employees, the company confirmed Tuesday.

Although it is not confirmed if the layoffs are isolated in gaming divisions, employees who work for Xbox and other Microsoft-owned studios said they were being laid off, the Washington Post reported. Axios first reported the layoffs Monday evening.

At this point, almost everyone can see that a recession is coming.

Even Jeff Bezos, who is usually extraordinarily optimistic, is warning people to “batten down the hatches”…

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos warned America’s to ‘batten down the hatches’ as he shared a tweet warning of a likely impending recession.

Bezos – who is the world’s second-richest man – tweeted a video of Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon saying there was a ‘good chance’ of a downturn.

The Amazon founder – who has a $137 billion fortune – signaled his agreement by captioning the tweet: ‘Yep, the probabilities in this economy tell you to batten down the hatches.’

When Jeff Bezos starts sounding like The Economic Collapse Blog, you know that the hour is late.

These days, our impending economic downturn has even become a very hot topic among Hollywood celebrities…

Even non-billionaire-but-still-rich person Gwyneth Paltrow is losing sleep over it.

“The economy sucks,” she told the Hollywood Reporter this week. “I’m just worried about next year and how bad the recession’s gonna be.”

Other celebrities are weighing in, too. Last month, rapper Cardi B ranted about inflation and interest rates. “How are people surviving? I want to know.”

If the middle class is steadily eroding during relatively stable times, what is going to happen once the economy really begins to unravel?

There is so much anger all over the United States right now, and the vast majority of the population is simply not prepared for what is ahead.

I have been writing about the demise of the middle class for more than a decade, and the condition of the middle class has never been worse than it is right now.

At one time America had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, and that was a wonderful thing.

But now very dark times for the middle class are here, and there doesn’t appear to be much hope on the horizon.

Things haven’t looked this bad for the U.S. economy since 2008.  We are in the midst of the worst inflation crisis in decades, the housing market has started to collapse, some of the largest companies in America have begun laying off workers, and economic activity is slowing down all around us.  Of course Joe Biden is telling us that our economy is “strong as hell”, but that is just because he wants his party to do well in the upcoming elections.  Ultimately, anyone that takes a truly objective view of things is forced to admit that the outlook for the months ahead is incredibly bleak.  The following are 12 reasons why it is impossible for any rational person to be optimistic about the U.S. economy at this point…

#1 According to a recent Gallup survey, two-thirds of Americans believe that economic conditions are getting worse.  When such a large proportion of the population starts behaving as though an economic downturn is coming, that actually makes an economic downturn even more likely.  So many Americans are starting to hold on to their money more tightly, and that is having lots of ripple effects.

#2 The second largest auto lender in the United States just announced that it “saw charge-offs for retail auto loans quadruple in the third quarter”.  We are also seeing credit card delinquencies start to rise.  We certainly aren’t at 2008 levels yet, but we are moving in that direction.

#3 Cargo traffic at the Port of Los Angeles just declined to the lowest level that we have seen since the early days of the pandemic.  As I noted earlier, economic activity is beginning to slow down all over the nation.  One recent survey discovered that 98 percent of corporate CEOs believe that a recession is coming, and those CEOs are behaving accordingly.

#4 Major retailers such as Walmart and Target have been canceling billions of dollars in orders as they seek to cut back inventory levels.  In all my years, I have never seen our largest retailers cancel so many orders just prior to the holiday season.  Are they expecting the next couple of months to be a total bust?

#5 Existing home sales just fell to a 10 year low.  We all knew that the housing market was going to implode once the Federal Reserve started to aggressively raise interest rates, but at this point that implosion is happening faster than most of the experts had anticipated.

#6 U.S. homebuilder sentiment has declined for 10 months in a row.  That is a brand new record.  I really feel sorry for you if you are a homebuilder or if you work for one.  The months ahead are not going to be pleasant for you.

#7 60,000 real estate deals were called off in the month of September alone.  I was stunned when I first saw that number.  All over the country buyers are realizing that they agreed to pay too much and are feverishly trying to back out of deals while they still can.

#8 Mortgage demand has plunged to the lowest level in 25 years.  Things never even got this bad during the downturn of 2008 and 2009.  To me, this is a really troubling sign.

#9 Ian Sheperdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, is projecting that home prices could fall 20 percent over the next year.  Hopefully that will not happen, but there is also a possibility that they could fall even further than that.  We will just have to wait and see how rapidly this new crisis plays out.

#10 U.S. diesel inventories have fallen to the lowest level since 2008.  This is something that we will want to watch very carefully, because the U.S. economy runs on diesel.

#11 The core consumer price index has just surged to “the highest level since 1982”.  Even though the Federal Reserve has been on an insane rate hiking spree, our inflation crisis continues to rage out of control.  And as prices continue to soar, our standard of living is being absolutely eviscerated.

#12 A model created by Bloomberg economists Anna Wong and Eliza Winger indicates that there is a 100 percent chance of a recession within the next 12 months.  Of course it is entirely possible that their model could be wrong.  But without a doubt this is not a good sign.

Right now, even some of our society’s most relentless optimists are warning that tough economic times are ahead.

For instance, in a post on Twitter Elon Musk just suggested that we could be suffering through a recession until the spring of 2024…

If Elon Musk is any type of financial prognosticator, the market and economy could be in trouble for more than a year to come.

When prompted in a Twitter thread early on Friday morning, the Tesla CEO said that he thought the current recession would last “probably until spring of ’24”.

Because he is such an optimist, Musk believes that economic conditions will turn around eventually.

But what if they don’t?

What if the “perfect storm” that we are currently enduring ultimately results in the collapse of everything?

Are you prepared for such a scenario?

Previous generations of Americans handed us the keys to the most prosperous economy that the world has ever seen.

But instead of managing it carefully, we have piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the planet, we have transformed Wall Street into the globe’s largest casino, and we have systematically destroyed the reserve currency of the world.

Thanks to a very long series of incredibly foolish decisions by our leaders, we are now facing a war with Russia, a collapse of the housing market, a global food crisis, a global inflation crisis and a worldwide financial meltdown simultaneously.

The entire system is starting to crumble all around us, but most people still believe that things will “return to normal” at some point.

Personally, I would love to see things “return to normal”, but unfortunately it appears that is not likely to happen any time soon.