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A confluence of circumstances has come together to create a “perfect storm” for global food production, and now that “perfect storm” is about to get even worse. For months I warned that this crisis was coming, and in recent weeks I have been documenting how dire conditions have already become all over the globe. The head of the UN World Food Program is warning that this is going to be the worst worldwide food crisis since World War II, and even Joe Biden is admitting that the approaching food shortages “are going to be real”. Unfortunately, there have been some new developments which threaten to significantly escalate things.

In recent days, the number of newly confirmed COVID cases in China has soared to record highs, and Chinese authorities have responded to this with unprecedented lockdowns.

As a result, almost 400 million Chinese are now “under full or partial lockdown”…

Nearly 400 million people across 45 cities in China are under full or partial lockdown as part of China’s strict zero-Covid policy. Together they represent 40%, or $7.2 trillion, of annual gross domestic product for the world’s second-largest economy, according to data from Nomura Holdings.

Analysts are ringing warning bells, but say investors aren’t properly assessing how serious the global economic fallout might be from these prolonged isolation orders.

Chinese lockdowns are a lot more brutal than lockdowns in the western world.

By now, you have probably seen video footage of Shanghai residents literally screaming from their apartment windows.

I have never seen anything like that before, and these lockdowns will continue as long as COVID keeps spreading.

To put this in perspective, the number of people that are currently locked down in China is greater than the total population of the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Geology Insider Explains Why The Global Energy Crisis Is Going To Get Much, Much Worse

January 31, 2022

A Geology Insider Explains Why The Global Energy Crisis Is Going To Get Much, Much Worse

It is becoming clear that we are in far more trouble than we are being told. In recent months, all forms of traditional energy have become significantly more expensive, and this is fueling price increases all over the planet. This new global energy crisis is directly responsible for the astounding rise in fertilizer prices, it has resulted in a tremendous amount of pain at the pump for millions of average Americans, and since virtually everything that we buy has to be transported it is a major contributing factor to the “inflation boom” that we are currently witnessing. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

I was recently contacted by a geologist that worked in the oil industry for more than a decade.

He patiently explained to me why things aren’t going to be getting any better.

I asked him if I could share some of what he sent to me with all of you, and he agreed. After reading this, I think that you will agree that it is quite a sobering assessment of the current state of affairs…

I am a geologist who has worked in the oil industry for over ten years. I was just coming out of school in time for the shale revolution and worked in Denver on the Bakken play in North Dakota, and then I worked the Permian out of Midland. These were the two major shale plays, so I have firsthand knowledge. I now teach environmental science for high-schoolers in Amman, Jordan.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Experts Are Warning That Empty Shelves And Food Shortages Are Going To Continue For Many Weeks To Come

January 18, 2022

Experts Are Warning That Empty Shelves And Food Shortages Are Going To Continue For Many Weeks To Come

The term “return to normal” is being thrown around a lot these days, but will things ever truly return to the way that they were before the pandemic came along? I don’t think so. From an economic standpoint, an extraordinary amount of lasting damage has been done over the past two years. A seemingly endless list of major problems has thrown thousands upon thousands of critical supply chains into a complete and utter state of chaos, and this has resulted in some very painful shortages. For quite a while, the mainstream media kept insisting that the shortages would soon be gone, but now they are being forced to admit the truth. If you can believe it, NPR has even published a major story about the growing shortages in this country…

No, you’re not imagining it. Some grocery store shelves are bare again, conjuring bad memories of spring 2020 for many.

Social media is rife with images of empty supermarket aisles and signs explaining the lack of available food and other items. Stores such as Aldi have apologized to customers for the shortages.

Nobody in the mainstream media ever imagined that the shortages would last this long.

For certain items such as computer chips, the duration of the shortages is now approaching two full years.

Of course fear of Omicron has made things even worse, and one expert interviewed by NPR suggested that supermarkets in the U.S. are now facing a “perfect storm”…

“We’re really seeing the perfect storm,” Phil Lempert, editor of the website SupermarketGuru.com, told NPR.

Isn’t it strange how that term just seems to keep popping up all over the place?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Now A U.S. Government Official Is Telling Us That The Supply Chain Nightmares Could Potentially Last For Years

October 13, 2021

Now A U.S. Government Official Is Telling Us That The Supply Chain Nightmares Could Potentially Last For Years

The truth is starting to come out, and a lot of people aren’t going to like it. When the supply chain problems and the shortages began, government officials repeatedly assured us that they would just be temporary, and most of us believed them. But now it has become clear that they aren’t going to be temporary at all. In fact, during a recent interview with Bloomberg, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg admitted that some of the supply chain problems that we are currently facing could last for “years and years”. I don’t know about you, but to me “years and years” sounds like a really long time.

Of course that is not the only time that Buttigieg has made such a claim. During another recent interview, he used the words “long term” to describe what we are facing…

Buttigieg has said in recent interviews that “it’s an incredibly complicated situation,” but the government is holding virtual “roundtables” with port operators, labor unions and private companies. Nevertheless, he told MSNBC last Thursday, the “challenges” will continue, not only “going into the next year or two, but going into the long term.”

Isn’t it remarkable how the outlook for our economic future has changed so dramatically in just a matter of a few months?

Earlier this year, we were told that we would soon be entering a new golden era of prosperity.

But now inflation and shortages are causing chaos everywhere we look.

Earlier today, I came across a Daily Mail article that boldly declared that “stores across America have empty shelves” right now…

Stores across America have empty shelves thanks to a series in supply chain problems that are prolonging inflation and could stretch into the new year, with some retailers like Costco and Walmart limiting the amount of toilet paper in some stores.

More than 60 cargo ships are waiting to dock in California, carrying hundreds of thousands of containers, and may be stuck for months in a traffic jam after arriving from China and Asia. Millions of dollars of American goods are still sitting in warehouses in China, awaiting shipment.

In addition to the unprecedented backlogs that we are witnessing at our major ports, it has also become far, far more expensive to send products across the Pacific Ocean.

Just check out these numbers…

‘Tis The Season For Bankruptcies, Store Closings And Tent Cities…

January 1, 2021

‘Tis The Season For Bankruptcies, Store Closings And Tent Cities…

We need to make 2021 a year of hope, because right now there is more economic suffering in America than we have seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. More than 100,000 businesses have permanently closed down since the pandemic began, many of our most iconic chains have filed for bankruptcy over the past 12 months, and tent cities are popping up in major cities all across the country. Coming into this year, the suicide rate in the U.S. was already at an all-time record high, and a Gallup survey recently discovered that the mental health of Americans is at an all-time low. If we can’t find a way to give people hope, multitudes of Americans will decide that life is no longer worth living just like Anthony Quinn Warner did. The explosion in Nashville should be a wake up call for all of us, because there are countless others out there that are feeling the hopelessness that Warner did.

In 2020, we saw retail stores close their doors at a pace that we have never seen before. According to the New York Post, NYC lost more than 1,000 chain stores all by itself…

The Big Apple saw almost one in seven nationally recognized chain-store branches close their doors as the pandemic sent consumers scurrying for cover, according to a new report.

A record high 1,057 chain stores — including 70 Duane Reades, 49 Starbucks and 22 Papyruses — have waved the white flag over the past 12 months, according to the Center for an Urban Future’s annual “State of the Chains” report, set to be released Wednesday.

If you go back to 2018, 0.3 percent of all chain stores in the city shut down permanently.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If You Feel Like Something Really, Really Bad Is About To Happen, You Are Definitely Not Alone

September 13, 2020

If You Feel Like Something Really, Really Bad Is About To Happen, You Are Definitely Not Alone

If this is “the recovery”, what are things going to look like once economic conditions start to deteriorate again? As you will see below, more than half of all households in some of our largest cities “are facing serious financial problems”, and Americans continue to file for unemployment benefits at a rate that the United States had never seen before prior to 2020. When 695,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits during a single week in 1982, it established a record which stood for nearly 38 years. But now we have been way above that old record for 25 weeks in a row. On Thursday, we learned that another 884,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…

Weekly jobless claims were worse than expected last week amid a plodding climb for the U.S. labor market from the damage inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Labor Department on Thursday reported 884,000 first-time filings for unemployment insurance, compared with 850,000 expected by economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The total was unchanged from the previous week.

Of course it is always important to look at the non-adjusted numbers, and according to those numbers we actually saw an increase over the previous week…

The Labor Department changed its methodology in how it seasonally adjusts the numbers, so the past two weeks’ totals are not directly comparable to the reports from earlier in the pandemic. Claims not adjusted for seasonal factors totaled 857,148, an increase of 20,140 from the previous week.

This is the second week in a row that the non-seasonally adjusted initial claims have risen.

That definitely wasn’t supposed to happen.

We are supposedly in a “recovery” right now, and things are supposed to be getting better.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Global Elite Have Far More Control Over Us Than Most People Would Dare To Imagine

August 21, 2020

The Global Elite Have Far More Control Over Us Than Most People Would Dare To Imagine

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you probably agree that the global elite have too much power and influence. It has been said that “money is power”, and today that seems to be more true than ever. Those at the very, very top of the pyramid dictate the rules of the game for the rest of us, and there isn’t too much that the rest of us can do about it. When we talk about how the global elite dominate our lives, the focus tends to be on how they influence national governments, but the truth is that is one of the areas where the global elite have the least control. I know that may sound strange, but I believe that things will become clearer by the end of this article.

I would submit that corporations are the primary vehicle that the elite use to control our lives. In fact, many global corporations are now larger and more powerful than most national governments, and collectively the network of global corporations that dominates the planet is far larger and far more powerful than any single national government.

A number of years ago, a remarkable study was conducted that closely examined the interconnecting relationships of major corporations all over the world. That study discovered that a network of 1,318 enormous companies dominated the global economy, and it also found that 147 colossal corporations at the core of that web formed a “super-entity” that controlled 40 percent of the entire network…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Numbers Tell Us That The ‘Economic Recovery’ Is Dead And Businesses Are Failing At A Staggering Pace

July 25, 2020

The Numbers Tell Us That The ‘Economic Recovery’ Is Dead And Businesses Are Failing At A Staggering Pace

Even though economic conditions were absolutely awful, during the month of June the mainstream media kept insisting that the U.S. economy was “recovering” and the stock market kept surging on every hint of good news. But now the “economic recovery” narrative is completely dead, because the numbers clearly show that the U.S. economy is rapidly moving in the wrong direction. On Thursday, the Labor Department announced that another 1.416 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week. Prior to this year, the all-time record for a single week was just 695,000, and so we are talking about a level of unemployment that is absolutely catastrophic. But what is really alarming many analysts is that the number for last week was quite a bit higher than the number for the week before. Many states are rolling out new restrictions as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases continues to surge, and this is having a huge impact on economic activity. For months I have been warning that fear of COVID-19 would prevent economic activity from returning to normal levels for the foreseeable future, and that is precisely what has happened.

Overall, more than 52 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits over the past 18 weeks, and that makes this the biggest spike in unemployment in U.S. history by a very wide margin.

In fact, this dwarfs all previous spikes by so much that the others are not even worth mentioning.

Of course it isn’t just the employment numbers that are depressingly bad. According to Jefferies, in late June 19 percent of all U.S. small businesses were closed, but now that number has risen to 24.5 percent…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A List Of 50 Things You Should Get Right Now To Prepare For The Chaotic Events Of The Next 12 Months

July 21, 2020

A List Of 50 Things You Should Get Right Now To Prepare For The Chaotic Events Of The Next 12 Months

People have been asking me to do an article like this for quite some time. In all the years that I have been writing, I have never seen so many of my readers so alarmed about our immediate future. Over and over again, I have been getting emails from people asking for advice about how to prepare for what is ahead, and so many of them are using the word “urgency” to describe what they are feeling. And I can definitely identify with that, because around the middle of last year that is a word that I started using constantly. I felt an urgency about 2020 that I had never felt about any other upcoming year, and there were certain things that I knew that I had to get done. One of those things that I had to get done was my new book, and it is now finished. The plan is to release it this month, and after reading it there will be no doubt about why I have been feeling such a sense of urgency in recent months.

I want to warn you in advance that the list below is not an exhaustive list.

Instead, it is meant to be a very basic starting guide. There are many other things that could (and probably should) be added to this list, and I very much encourage readers to leave comments after this article with their own suggestions and recommendations. We should always be willing to learn from one another, because nobody is an expert on everything.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Americans Have Already Skipped Payments On More Than 100 Million Loans, And Job Losses Continue To Escalate

June 19, 2020

Americans Have Already Skipped Payments On More Than 100 Million Loans, And Job Losses Continue To Escalate

Those that have been hoping for some sort of a “V-shaped recovery” have had their hopes completely dashed. U.S. workers continue to lose jobs at a staggering rate, and economic activity continues to remain at deeply suppressed levels all over the nation. Of course this wasn’t supposed to happen now that states have been “reopening” their economies. We were told that things would soon be getting back to normal and that the economic numbers would rebound dramatically. But that is not happening. In fact, the number of Americans that filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week was much higher than expected…

Weekly jobless claims stayed above 1 million for the 13th consecutive week as the coronavirus pandemic continued to hammer the U.S. economy.
First-time claims totaled 1.5 million last week, higher than the 1.3 million that economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting. The government report’s total was 58,000 lower than the previous week’s 1.566 million, which was revised up by 24,000.

To put this in perspective, let me once again remind my readers that prior to this year the all-time record for a single week was just 695,000. So even though more than 44 million Americans had already filed initial claims for unemployment benefits before this latest report, there were still enough new people losing jobs to more than double that old record from 1982.

That is just astounding. We were told that the economy would be regaining huge amounts of jobs by now, but instead job losses remain at a catastrophic level that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before in all of U.S. history.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

No, The U.S. Economy Will Definitely Not Be Returning To “Normal”. In Fact, Things Will Soon Get Even Worse.

June 11, 2020

No, The U.S. Economy Will Definitely Not Be Returning To “Normal”. In Fact, Things Will Soon Get Even Worse.

2020 has been quite a year so far. It has been one nightmare after another, and yet the economic optimists continue to insist that economic activity will soon snap back to normal levels somehow. So the economic optimists aren’t really alarmed by the fact that the core areas of our major cities have been torched, gutted and looted by rioters, because they assume that all of this violence is just a temporary phenomenon and that any damage that has been done can be repaired. And they aren’t really alarmed by the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to escalate again. In fact, over the last seven days we have seen the number of newly confirmed cases around the globe hit levels that we have never seen before. They just assume that “the worst is behind us” and that the vast majority of the businesses and jobs that have been lost during this pandemic will be quickly recovered.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were actually correct?

Sadly, the truth is that economic conditions will not be returning to normal. Yes, some of the jobs that were lost will be recovered as states start to “reopen” their economies. But more than 100,000 businesses have already permanently closed during this new economic downturn, and all of those jobs are lost forever.

And yes, the level of economic activity will rise as states end their lockdowns, but it will still be much lower than it was before COVID-19 started spreading like wildfire in the United States.

At this point, even the perpetually optimistic OECD is admitting that global economic activity as a whole will be way down in 2020…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A ‘Biblical’ Plague Of Locusts Has Put Millions On The Brink Of Famine: “We Have Never, Ever Seen What We Have In The Last Six Months”

June 9, 2020

A ‘Biblical’ Plague Of Locusts Has Put Millions On The Brink Of Famine: “We Have Never, Ever Seen What We Have In The Last Six Months”

Billions upon billions of voracious desert locusts are ravenously devouring crops over a vast portion of the globe that stretches from eastern Africa all the way to India. This unprecedented plague was supposed to be subsiding by now, but instead a fourth generation of locusts has emerged that is producing swarms that are “up to 8,000 times larger” than what we witnessed earlier this year. Some of these swarms are the size of major cities, they can travel up to 150 kilometers a day, and when they descend upon a farm they can literally eat everything there in as little as 30 seconds. Because these swarms are not affecting the United States, most Americans don’t understand the immense devastation that is happening on the other side of the globe right now. The UN is warning that mass starvation is coming, and we are being told that it is going to begin by the end of this calendar year.

Each desert locust is very small, but collectively they can consume vast amounts of food. According to the UN, a swarm that contains between 40 and 80 million locusts can eat “the same amount of food in a day as three million people”.

And it is important to remember that colossal swarms of locusts have been destroying countless farms day after day for many months. What we have already witnessed is enough to constitute a major global emergency, and now the International Rescue Committee is telling us that this latest generation of locusts is the worst of them all by far…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Most U.S. States Have ‘Reopened’ Their Economies, So Why Does Unemployment Continue To Spiral Out Of Control?

June 7, 2020

Most U.S. States Have ‘Reopened’ Their Economies, So Why Does Unemployment Continue To Spiral Out Of Control?

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Once states started to “reopen” their economies, the tsunami of unemployment was supposed to end. But instead, we continue to see Americans lose jobs at a pace that is far beyond anything we have ever seen before in all of U.S. history. All the way back in 1982, there was a week when 695,000 Americans filed initial claims for unemployment benefits, and that all-time record was never broken until this year. Of course we have seen monster number after monster number here in 2020, and we just learned that last week another 1.877 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits…

Filings for unemployment insurance claims totaled 1.877 million last week in a sign that the worst is over for the coronavirus-related jobs crisis but that the level of unemployment remains stubbornly high.
Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for 1.775 million new claims. The Labor Department’s total nevertheless represented a decline from the previous week’s upwardly revised total of 2.126 million.

So even though more than 40 million Americans had already lost their jobs in 2020, there were still enough people losing their jobs last week to surpass the old record from 1982 by more than a million.

Just think about that.

Overall, a grand total of 42.6 million Americans have now lost their jobs since the pandemic began, and that makes this the largest spike in unemployment in all of U.S. history by a very wide margin.

And when the monthly employment report comes out on Friday, the official U.S. unemployment rate is expected to surpass 20 percent…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Food Banks Warn They Will Soon Run Out Of Food As Economic Suffering Explodes All Over America

April 6, 2020

Food Banks Warn They Will Soon Run Out Of Food As Economic Suffering Explodes All Over America

What are hungry Americans going to do when the food banks don’t have any more food for them? Over the past couple of weeks, we have witnessed the largest spike in unemployment in all of U.S. history. Since most of those workers did not have any sort of a cushion to fall bank on, a lot of of them have been forced to seek out emergency assistance for themselves and their families almost immediately. Of course our national network of food banks was not built to handle this sort of a scenario, and as you will see below, many of them are already starting to run out of food. But if things are this bad at the very beginning of this new economic downturn, what are things going to look like a few months from now?

It is imperative for people to understand that we are now in uncharted territory. At this point, even the head of the IMF is warning that this new economic crisis will be “way worse” that the last recession…

The coronavirus pandemic has created an economic crisis “like no other” — one that is “way worse” than the 2008 global financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund’s top official said Friday.
“Never in the history of the IMF have we witnessed the world economy come to a standstill,” Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF, said at a news conference.

And of course we are already seeing economic numbers in the United States that absolutely blow away anything that we witnessed back in 2008 and 2009. I don’t know that any of us ever anticipated seeing a single week when 6.6. million Americans would file new claims for unemployment benefits.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global Crop Failures Continue: In Australia This Is Going To Be The WORST HARVEST Ever Recorded

February 21, 2020

Global Crop Failures Continue: In Australia This Is Going To Be The WORST HARVEST Ever Recorded

Global food production is being hit from seemingly every side. Thanks to absolutely crazy weather patterns, giant locust armies in Africa and the Middle East, and an unprecedented outbreak of African Swine Fever in China, a lot less food is being produced around the world than originally anticipated. Even during the best of years we really struggle to feed everyone on the planet, and so a lot of people are wondering what is going to happen as global food supplies become tighter and tighter. The mainstream media in the United States is so obsessed with politics right now that they haven’t been paying much attention to this emerging crisis, but the truth is that this growing nightmare is only going to intensify in the months ahead.

In Australia, conditions have been extremely hot and extremely dry, and that helped to fuel the horrific wildfires that we recently witnessed.

And everyone knew that agricultural production in Australia was going to be disappointing this year, but it turns out that it is actually going to be the worst ever recorded…

Australia’s hottest and driest year on record has slashed crop production, with summer output expected to fall to the lowest levels on record, according to official projections released Tuesday.
The country’s agriculture department said it expects production of crops like sorghum, cotton and rice to fall 66 percent — the lowest levels since records began in 1980-81.

The continent of Australia is considered to be one of the breadbaskets of the world. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2018/19 Australia exported over 9 million tons of wheat to the rest of the world.

But thanks to relentless crop failures, Australia has started to import wheat, and that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

So instead of helping to feed the rest of the world, Australia is now relying on the rest of us to help feed them.

And what is happening this year didn’t just barely break the old records. In fact, one senior economist says that this will be the worst summer crop production the country has ever seen “by a large margin”…

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