"Food Shortages In 2027? The ICC Warns That Global Food Prices Could Rise By Close To 70% – I Asked AI What Would Happen Next"

by Michael Snyder

"All over social media, people want to know if there will be food shortages in 2027. Coming into this year, the UN was warning that global hunger had reached an unprecedented level. Now we are facing a global fertilizer crisis, a global energy crisis, widespread droughts, a Super El Niño and World War III all at the same time. Of course global hunger is going to get even worse in the months ahead. Nobody can deny that. Wealthy nations such as the United States will theoretically be in the best shape, but even here in the U.S. approximately 1 out of every 7 people already live in food insecure households. Rapidly rising food prices will definitely be very painful for us, but for millions of people that live in deeply impoverished countries much higher food prices could suddenly make it impossible for them to buy enough food to properly feed their families.

How would you feel if members of your family were extremely hungry but you didn’t have anything to give them? For many of us, that would be unimaginable. Unfortunately, such a scenario could soon become a reality in needy households all over the planet.

For months, I have been warning that the global energy crisis and the global fertilizer crisis were going to have an enormous impact on food production. Now harvest season is here, and the consequences are starting to become apparent. The following comes from a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Hormuz Gridlock Risks Global Food Crisis, International Chamber of Commerce Chief Says”… Disruptions to a vital shipping route in the Middle East have created an energy shock. Now, a global food security crisis is brewing, warns the secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce.

The secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce is a man named John Denton. He is a legal expert on international trade and investment, and he is projecting that global grain prices could potentially increase by up to 80 percent… The monthslong conflict between Iran and the US has curbed the flow of goods through the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway many countries rely on for imports of critical inputs like fertilizers and natural gas.

According to Denton, if the strait is not reopened, grain prices could rise by up to 80%, which would be particularly hard on the economies of import-dependent countries. He added that the situation in the Strait of Hormuz has caused a shortage of about 2.7 million tons of fertilizer on the world market. Less fertilizer means less food. That is the bottom line.

If we do see such a spike in global grain prices (and they have already been rising), an ICC-commissioned model determined that global food prices overall could increase by close to 70 percent…A prolonged disruption to fertilizer and energy markets linked to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz could push global cereal prices sharply higher, with potentially severe consequences for food security and public health, according to new modelling commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). In the study’s most severe scenario, global cereal prices rise by as much as 81% above 2020 levels. The shock also feeds through sharply to households, with consumer food prices in East Asia, the Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa rising close to 70% above a 2020 baseline.

In recent years, the world has not even come close to producing enough food for everyone. Now global food supplies are going to get substantially tighter. As a result, there will be a mad scramble for whatever is available, and this will really drive up prices. In the end, a lot more people will be malnourished and a lot more people will die from starvation…Conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Aberdeen and Scotland’s Rural College, the modelling shows how the shock would work its way through the global food system. Higher fertilizer and energy costs reduce nitrogen fertiliser use by approximately 37% and cereal productivity by up to 10%, tightening supply and raising prices for consumers.

For poorer households, these price increases translate into lower calorie consumption, less diverse diets and higher rates of underweight. Under the same severe and sustained scenario, the modelling suggests that the shock could contribute to approximately one million additional dietary health-related deaths in 2030 and leave 67 million more people underweight.

The burden would fall overwhelmingly on lower-income regions. South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia and the Pacific would account for around 80% of the additional mortality and more than 90% of the additional underweight burden. Modelled health outcomes would change little in higher-income regions. The poorest nations will get hit the hardest. But we will all be affected.

I asked Google AI to tell me what would happen if the type of scenario that the ICC is envisioning actually plays out. This is what I was told…

Massive Food Inflation: Retail prices for bread, cereal, and packaged goods would skyrocket globally.
Surging Meat Prices: Livestock feed costs would soar, forcing ranchers to cull herds and driving up the cost of beef, pork, and poultry.
Severe Humanitarian Crisis: Lower-income nations that rely heavily on grain imports would face immediate, widespread food insecurity and potential famine.
Geopolitical Instability: Historically, drastic food price spikes trigger civil unrest, protests, and political revolutions (similar to the 2011 Arab Spring).
Protectionist Trade Policies: Major grain-exporting countries would likely ban or restrict exports to safeguard their domestic food supplies, worsening the global shortage.

That sounds about right. There are some people out there that are touting the fact that they warned about this months in advance. Of course there are others that were warning about all of this years in advance.

As long as commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains restricted, the global fertilizer crisis and the global energy crisis will both just continue to intensify. Unfortunately, the Iranians are telling us that they will keep attacking commercial vessels that are traveling through the Strait of Hormuz until the United States agrees to their entire list of demands…

The Strait of Hormuz is going to remain closed until the United States accepts Tehran’s seven-day plan to reopen the waterway, Iran’s top negotiator and parliament speaker has said.

Iranian state-linked news agency Nournews, quoting ⁠Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, reported on Sunday that Washington made “some proposals through a mediator” days after the US replied ⁠to Iran’s diplomatic proposal. "The US should know “that the era of wasting time and dictating unilateral demands is over”, Ghalibaf said, adding Iran’s position remains “clear and definite”.

There is no way that the Trump administration will ever agree to all of Iran’s demands. So on and on we go. I realize that food prices are absurdly high now, but they are going to go even higher. But as long as you have enough to eat, you should be very thankful, because there are many on the other side of the planet that are desperately hungry right now. Yes, there will be food shortages in 2027. At this stage, the debate is about how intense they will become. Hunger is on the rise all over the planet, and the higher food prices go the worse it will get."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

You didn't really think you'd ever see any of that, did you?

"The New Dark Age"

"The New Dark Age"

The genocide in Gaza is not an anomaly. It illustrates something fundamental 

about human nature and is a terrifying harbinger of where the world is headed.

by Chris Hedges

CAIRO, Egypt - "It is 200 miles from where I am in Cairo to the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Parked in the arid sands in the northern Sinai of Egypt are 2,000 trucks filled with sacks of flour, water tanks, canned food, medical supplies, tarps and fuel. The trucks idle under the scorching sun with temperatures climbing into the high 90s.

A few miles away in Gaza, dozens of men, women and children, living in crude tents or damaged buildings amid the rubble, are being butchered daily from bullets, bombs, missile strikes, tank shells, infectious diseases and that most ancient weapon of siege warfare - starvation. One in five people are facing starvation after nearly three months of Israel’s blockade of food and humanitarian aid.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that nothing will impede this final assault. Israel is “destroying more and more houses” in Gaza. The Palestinians “have nowhere to return.” “The only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip,” he told lawmakers at a leaked closed-door meeting. “But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.”

The nine-mile border between Egypt and Gaza has become the dividing line between the Global South and the Global North, the demarcation between a world of savage industrial violence and the desperate struggle by those cast aside by the wealthiest nations. It marks the end of a world where humanitarian law, conventions that protect civilians or the most basic and fundamental rights matter. It ushers in a Hobbesian nightmare where the strong crucify the weak, where no atrocity, including genocide, is precluded, where the white race in the Global North reverts to the unrestrained, atavistic savagery and domination that defines colonialism and our centuries long history of pillage and exploitation. We are tumbling backwards in time to our origins, origins that never left us, but origins that were masked by empty promises of democracy, justice and human rights.

The Nazis are the convenient scapegoats for our shared European and American heritage of mass slaughter, as if the genocides we carried out in the Americas, Africa and India did not take place, unimportant footnotes in our collective history. In fact, genocide is the currency of Western domination.

Between 1490 and 1890, European colonization, including acts of genocide, was responsible for killing as many as 100 million indigenous people, according to the historian David E. Stannard. Since 1950 there have been nearly two dozen genocides, including those in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Rwanda.

The genocide in Gaza is part of a pattern. It is the harbinger of genocides to come, especially as the climate breaks down and hundreds of millions are forced to flee to escape droughts, wildfires, flooding, declining crop yields, failed states and mass death. It is a blood-soaked message from us to the rest of the world: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.

Gaza puts to rest the lie of human progress, the myth that we are evolving morally. Only the tools change. Where once we clubbed victims to death, or chopped them to pieces with broadswords, today we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps, spray families with bullets from militarized drones or pulverize them with tank shells, heavy artillery and missiles.

The 19th century socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief central to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality. He warned that this absurd positivism is perpetrated by oppressors to disempower the oppressed.

“All atrocities of the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant, inevitable evolution, like that of nature… But the sequence of human things is not inevitable like that of the universe. It can be changed at any moment.” Blanqui warned.

Scientific and technological advancement, rather than an example of progress, could “become a terrible weapon in the hands of Capital against Work and Thought.” “For humanity” Blanqui wrote, “is never stationary. It either advances or goes back. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.” Further, he wrote, “I am not amongst those who claim that progress can be taken for granted, that humanity cannot go backwards.”

Human history is defined by long periods of cultural barrenness and brutal repression. The fall of the Roman Empire led to immiseration and repression throughout Europe during the Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth through the 13th century. There was a loss of technical knowledge, including how to build and maintain aqueducts. Cultural and intellectual impoverishment led to collective amnesia. The ideas of ancient scholars and artists were blotted out. There was no rebirth until the 14th century and the Renaissance, a development made possible largely by the cultural flourishing of Islam, which, through translating Aristotle into Arabic and other intellectual accomplishments, kept the wisdom of the past from disappearing.

Blanqui knew history’s tragic reverses. He took part in a series of French revolts, including an attempted armed insurrection in May 1839, the 1848 uprising and the Paris Commune - a socialist uprising that controlled France’s capital from March 18 until May 28 in 1871. Workers in cities such as Marseilles and Lyon attempted, but failed, to organize similar communes before the Paris Commune was militarily crushed.

We are entering a new dark age. This dark age uses the modern tools of mass surveillance, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, drones, militarized police, the revoking of due process and civil liberties to inflict the arbitrary rule, incessant wars, insecurity, anarchy and terror that were the common denominators of the Dark Ages. To trust in the fairy tale of human progress to save us is to become passive before despotic power. Only resistance, defined by mass mobilization, by disrupting the exercise of power, especially against genocide, can save us.

Campaigns of mass killing unleash the feral qualities that lie latent in all humans. The ordered society, with its laws, etiquette, police, prisons and regulations, all forms of coercion, keeps these latent qualities in check. Remove these impediments and humans become, as we see with the Israelis in Gaza, murderous, predatory animals, reveling in the intoxication of destruction, including of women and children. I wish this was conjecture. It is not. It is what I witnessed in every war I covered. Almost no one is immune.

The Belgian monarch King Leopold in the late 19th century occupied the Congo in the name of Western civilization and anti-slavery, but plundered the country, resulting in the death - by disease, starvation and murder - of some 10 million Congolese.

Joseph Conrad captured this dichotomy between who we are and who we say we are in his novel “Heart of Darkness” and his short story “An Outpost of Progress.” In “An Outpost of Progress,” he tells the story of two European traders, Carlier and Kayerts, who are sent to the Congo. These traders claim to be in Africa to implant European civilization. The boredom, the stifling routine, and most importantly the lack of all outside constraints, turns the two men into beasts. They trade slaves for ivory. They fight over dwindling food and supplies. Kayerts finally murders his unarmed companion Carlier.

“They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,” Conrad wrote of Kayerts and Carlier, “whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. 

But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations - to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.”

The genocide in Gaza has imploded the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It mocks every virtue we claim to uphold, including the right of freedom of expression. It is a testament to our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. We cannot, having provided billions of dollars in weapons and persecuted those who decry the genocide, make moral claims anymore that will be taken seriously. Our language, from now on, will be the language of violence, the language of genocide, the monstrous howling of the new dark age, one where absolute power, unchecked greed and unmitigated savagery stalks the earth."

- https://chrishedges.substack.com/

"How ‘Never Again’ Lost Meaning in Gaza"

"How ‘Never Again’ Lost Meaning in Gaza"

by M. Reza Behnam

"Looking across the devastated landscape of the Gaza Strip, where surviving generations now carry the permanent physical and psychological scars of war, the ultimate indictment of our era is damning: The world watched the horror unfold in real-time, possessed all the legal, political and institutional mechanisms to stop it, and did nothing.

For months, then years, the catastrophe in Gaza tested the fabric of international law, the integrity of global governance and the moral conscience of humanity. From the halls of the United Nations to the high courts of The Hague, what followed was not information failure, but a shameful surrender of political and moral will.

Rarely does history deliver such swift and scathing hindsight. Three years after October 7, 2023, the real horror of Gaza is that this barbarity was never hidden; it was broadcast live in high definition to a global audience that watched, debated, proceduralized, and allowed it to continue.

Israel’s war on Palestinians continues uninterrupted. Despite having the influence to halt the crisis, major international powers have not intervened, allowing the regime and its colonizers to increase their violence across both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

As time lifts the fog of war, the systemic breakdown of global institutions and governments becomes unmistakably apparent. The world failed to stop the genocide in Gaza not because it lacked awareness or warning. It faltered because the “rules-based” international order (aka Western order) is structurally and morally bankrupt, paralyzed by complicity, cowardice and double standards.

The war exposed international humanitarian law as a selective tool of the West – applied swiftly to some, but suspended when it inconveniences the powerful. Governments that traditionally postured as champions of human rights have prioritized strategic alignments over universal legal and humanitarian obligations.

During the initial months of the onslaught, as the number killed rose into the tens of thousands and entire neighborhoods were flattened with their residents inside, global diplomats did what they do best: use bureaucratic delays to stall for time.

While hospitals were besieged and children underwent amputations without anesthesia, on blood-soaked floors, the UN Security Council degenerated into a theater of deadlock. The world’s premier body for collective security rendered global consensus impotent and buckled under superpower threats.

Repeated resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire were either vetoed or watered down into toothless rhetoric. Meanwhile, international courts meticulously deliberated over the legal nuances of genocide while graves multiplied and atrocities continued uninterrupted.

Today, as the International Court of Justice unhurriedly considers its final ruling on South Africa’s 2023 genocide case against Israel, tangible memories of Palestine are being erased; centuries of history, culture and ancestral lineages are being obliterated. For Palestine, justice delayed is not justice denied; it is genocide completed.

Three years of impunity, of unprosecuted genocide, reveals that the value of human life is being measured on a sliding scale; that it is weighed based on race, geography and political utility. In retrospect, these procedural and administrative delays look less like structural gridlock and more like an active cover-up. Every month spent debating the semantics of humanitarian corridors or compliance with international law gave carte blanche to Israel’s military onslaught.

The harshest criticism of the last three years falls on Western powers. Governments that never tire of lecturing the world on human rights, rules based order and international jurisprudence performed moral gymnastics to justify the unjustifiable.

We watched as world leaders converged on Israel with blank checks of allegiance, supplying an uninterrupted stream of munitions that reduced universities, schools, hospitals, markets, bookstores, bakeries, places of worship and apartment blocks to rubble. While publicly wringing their hands, in private, these same leaders approved the weapon shipments. And, in a cruel theatrical act of humanitarian absolution, they authorized the aerial dropping of meager sacks of flour into the very zones in Gaza they helped leave in ruins.

Failure was not restricted to the halls of power; the entire mainstream media landscape failed alongside it. For months, reporters on the ground in Gaza – those who were not among the hundreds systematically targeted and killed – fought to pierce a wall of severe censorship and dehumanization.

In the West, corporate media tied itself in knots trying to sanitize language in order to obscure Israel’s direct responsibility for the ongoing violence. Outlets downplayed Palestinian deaths by using passive language like “died” to treat mass casualties as collateral damage, all while elevating voices that defended the legitimacy of the war.

The public response, however, revealed a deeper fracture. Millions marched in cities worldwide, launching one of the largest sustained anti-war mobilizations in a generation. Yet, the disconnect between the governed and the governing remained absolute. Western democracies proved entirely immune to the moral demands of their own citizens.

The silence of the last three years has been deafening. There was never any doubt about the genocide, nor a dearth of international laws to end it. Instead, the failure lies entirely with Western institutional gatekeepers who have lacked the courage to act. Allowing genocide to go unpunished creates a dangerous precedent for global security. If international law and justice are buried in the rubble of Gaza, the global community will ultimately be digging its own grave."

- https://original.antiwar.com/reza_behnam/

o

A Comment: There are no words strong enough to condemn YOU, Americans, for allowing and supporting this horror, for paying for every single bullet, rifle, tank, artillery piece, fighter bomber jet, bomb, air defense radars, everything! And now sending 40,000 2,000 lb. bombs to these murderers, which YOU are paying for! 97,000 identified civilians have been slaughtered, including 29,000 CHILDREN, at least another 10,000 buried under the bombed out rubble, no water, no electricity, and mass starvation because Israel is blocking aid, and the Arab countries and the whole world watches it and does nothing! That blood's on YOUR hands too, to our eternal disgrace! God damn them all, these killers of unarmed innocent old people, men, women and children to Hell. Hell is not hot enough, eternity is not long enough for these psychopathically degenerate inbred monsters... That's my opinion, and I don't give a damn who doesn't like it... - CP

Americans! Hang your heads in eternal shame and disgrace! Read it, you paid for it all, YOU allowed and supported this horror! Scott Ritter has said "Israel is Evil embodied. Israel is Evil personified." And so are we...

"You Can’t Turn Back the Clock on Genocide:

 'Easily 200,000 Deaths in Gaza.'”

"The Depopulation Race Before the Financial Collapse: The Globalists Are Killing Us Before We Can Revolt"

"The Depopulation Race Before the Financial Collapse:

The Globalists Are Killing Us Before We Can Revolt"

by Mike Adams

"I have spent more than two decades documenting the systematic dismantling of human health, wealth and freedom, and what I see now is not a random cascade of crises. It is a race. The globalist class understands that its fiat currency system is terminal, that the debt pyramid cannot stand, and that the bail-ins, asset confiscations and savings wipeouts now being prepared will ignite a fury unlike anything the West has seen. Their solution is as old as tyranny itself: shrink the population before the people can organize and revolt.

In my assessment, the engineered famine, the weaponized bioweapons and the coming financial reset are not separate events. They are sequenced. The so-called "kill phase" of human extermination is already underway, and the architects are deliberately stretching out the timeline to collapse while accelerating the depopulation vectors today. Every crisis being manufactured right now is a cover story for a larger crime, a pattern I have watched repeat for over twenty years. The race is on, and the only question is whether enough of us wake up in time.

The mRNA Rollout Is a Biological Weapon, Not a Vaccine: It's abundantly clear that the mRNA platform is not a vaccine in any honest sense of the word. It is gene therapy, and in the hands of people who have openly discussed depopulation, it becomes a biological weapon. I have spoken with Pfizer's former head toxicologist Helmut Sturz, author of "The Vaccine Mafia," and the evidence he has assembled points to deliberate design for harm rather than any genuine public health purpose. When you understand that the intellectual property does not reside in the vial but inside your own cells - that Moderna effectively installs an operating system in your body - the entire enterprise reveals itself as something far more sinister than medicine.

The mechanism itself defies the vaccine label. These injections persist in tissues for hundreds of days, circulate through the bloodstream, cross the blood-brain barrier and lodge in organs. Self-replicating mRNA constructs can spread the spike protein payload and the replication engine from person to person. Dr. Murakami, a renowned Japanese immunologist, sounded the alarm about exactly this danger when his country prepared to deploy them. Meanwhile, the financial architecture removes all accountability: manufacturers enjoy legal immunity while doctors are paid bonuses to inject patients. That is not a health program. It is a biological crime against humanity, and it is being carried out with state sanction.

My advice could not be more direct. Do not ever take another vaccine, and especially never take an mRNA injection. Protect your natural immunity with vitamin D, zinc, ivermectin and medicinal herbs instead, and prepare for the next bioweapon rollout, because it is coming.

Economic Collapse, Deflation and the Great Asset Grab: As depopulation accelerates, the demand side of the economy dies with the people. Real estate, commodities, oil, retail, restaurants and autos will crater. The U.S. government and its central bankers will respond the only way they know how -- by printing frantically to counter deflation, which concentrates real wealth into fewer hands while everyone else is left holding worthless assets. This is the literal fulfillment of the slogan "you will own nothing and be happy": the things you own will be almost worthless, and the vaccinated may be dead.

The stakes go far beyond portfolio losses. If the architects succeed in killing fifty or ninety percent of humanity, land, homes and commercial buildings become free for the taking. Agriculture collapses alongside the population it feeds - the Haber-Bosch reaction that sustains roughly half the world's food supply is itself a house of cards about to go offline. Civilization as we know it unravels, and the reset proceeds on the ashes.

This is not an accident. It is a design: kill billions, reset the currency, confiscate everything, then replace human workers with robots and AI. The automation wave is already hollowing out labor -- within a few years AI will displace more than half of remote and blue-collar roles, and leaked documents show Amazon alone plans to automate seventy-five percent of its workforce. Depopulation and automation are two sides of the same globalist coin.

Gold, Silver and the Survival Recipe They Don't Want You to Know: Physical gold and silver in your own possession are the only honest money that survives currency collapse and bail-ins. Major banks including BNP Paribas and JPMorgan predict gold could surge beyond $6,000 an ounce by year-end. Put into metals whatever you cannot afford to lose. Everything else in stocks, treasuries and bank accounts may evaporate in the reset, and the banks will not protect you when the seizure orders arrive. (Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Do your own research and check with your own financial advisor.)

But wealth means nothing if you are dead. Your health is the first asset you must defend. Refuse all vaccines, detox your body from the heavy metals and spike proteins the system has injected or fed into you, and build genuine natural immunity through clean food, sunlight, superfoods, herbs and self-reliance. The medical system that profits from sickness will not save you. Natural medicine will.

The last piece is decentralization. Prepare to be off-grid, armed with real assets, clean water, food production and a community of like-minded people - only the rugged and the prepared will survive what is coming. I lay all of this out in my genetic survival course (GeneticSurvival.com), and I continue to publish the recipe for free at BrightVideos.com, NaturalNews.com and BrightLearn.ai, where anyone can generate their own survival and health books at no cost. The knowledge is there. Use it.

Conclusion: Be One of the Survivors, Not a Statistic: From their evil perspective, the globalists have a perfect plan: depopulate, reset, enslave and automate. On paper it works flawlessly. In practice it depends on one thing - mass obedience. Most people are too obedient and too comfortable to resist, so billions may die. But a defensive success is saving even one or two billion lives. That is the fight I am in, and it is a fight worth winning.

The smart have already awakened. Now we must stay informed, self-reliant and ready for hell on earth. You have a clear choice: take the jabs and die, or fight for life with gold, silver, natural health and decentralized community. I teach the straightforward recipe for survival every single day on my platforms. Be one of the survivors. We can make it through, but only if you decide to act before they finish the race."

- https://www.naturalnews.com/

Bill Bonner, "Swindling the Swindler"

US government debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP.

Click image for larger size.

"Swindling the Swindler"

by Bill Bonner

Ardmore, Ireland - "Will wonders never cease! Inflation is being rehabilitated. It used to be a bad thing. A proper villain. A swindler. Now...it is the nation’s savior. Dan Denning: "From 1945 to 1980, real interest rates were negative about half the time in the US. That translated into a yearly reduction of debt-to-GDP levels by about 3-4%. The gross federal debt-to-GDP ratio in the US was 120% in 1946. Through ‘financial repression’ (negative real rates) that ratio dropped to 60% by 1956. The economy ran very hot. By 1981, the ratio was just 31%."

Last week...we left you on the ledge, wondering if it were time to jump. Our insight was that the feds can no longer ‘inflate their way out’ of the debt trap. And yet, as Dan shows us, that’s just what they did in the 35 years after WWII.And now, POTUS aims to do it again. Fortune: "Trump just soft-launched higher inflation as the new solution for rebalancing the $40 trillion U.S. national debt It was a point Trump touched on in a recent interview with Time. In the past, he said, lower rates made borrowing cheaper. He added that in the current period, where the Fed has recently increased rates, “you can do it through other means. I know I’m the best in the world. The best - I don’t want to tell you what those means are, but you can pay off the debt through other means.”

Trump also said something that will prick the ears of economists: “You know, inflation, certain levels of inflation, will also pay off that debt very rapidly. Very rapidly.” The ‘other means’ he fails to identify are the familiar ones: borrow, spend and print. And count on ‘inflation’ to lower your debt. But we’ve got bad news for Trump. That was then. This is now.

Back then, the US economy was growing, grosso modo, about twice to three times as fast as it is now. It was real growth - from factories, sweat and babies - not just AI speculation. And it was funded by real money. People invested their savings carefully...and expected a decent return. This was before the economy - including our political economy - was ruined by fake money. Incomes rose with GDP. Tax receipts rose too. And not everybody was disabled or retired.

Yes, the US ended WWII with about as much debt/GDP as we have now. But almost overnight, it stopped the spending spree. The welfare state was still a toddler. And Eisenhower, who knew better than almost anyone how much military spending we needed, cut it by a third.

Today is in many respects the opposite situation. Yes, we have a trash mountain of debt...just as we did in 1946. But after the war ended, the budget was more or less balanced for the next 25 years. It wasn’t until the funny money started up in 1971 that deficits became routine. And today, they’re in the $1.5 - $2 trillion range.

One thing the two periods - then and now - have in common is the PRIMARY TREND. Interest rates hit a low after the war and then rose for the next 35 years, finally hitting 13% in 1980. We are most likely at the beginning of another long cycle of rising inflation and interest rates. But high interest rates are one thing when your economy is booming, your budget is balanced and you can refinance debts from real savings. When you are adding a trillion in debt every five months...it’s a whole different thing.

If the feds were actually bringing order to the federal budget, investors could take their meager coupons in good grace. The 10-year note is priced today to pay out a net, after consumer inflation, of only 1.8%. That is not good, but no cause for panic. The alarm sounds when they read the news and discover that the feds haven’t the slightest inclination to balance their books. Instead, they are planning to borrow, spend, and print until the cows come home.

‘Inflation will get worse,’ guesses the savvy investor; he may have bought US Treasuries, but he is not a complete fool. As the feds inflate, interest rates rise...deflating the whole kit and caboodle of credit-based prices. The feds add $...and Mr. Market subtracts $2 in higher interest charges. What this means is that ‘inflation’ no longer does the job it was intended to do. That is, it no longer robs the unsuspecting plain people to cover the feds’ out-of-control expenses; it robs itself too.

This will come as a big disappointment to POTUS. The feds can still ‘print’...but the printing produces higher rates that cripple the economy, increase the interest on the national debt, and reduce real federal tax receipts. The swindle swindles the swindler as well as the public."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Jim Kunstler, "Pornish Hen"

A group of young men standing side by side stared up at the house, yelling and cursing at the defunct fraternity and the seven former members whom Jane Doe accused of assault. One of the men threatened to throw a rock through a window before his companions hustled him away.

"Pornish Hen"

by Jim Kunstler

“NY Attorney General Letitia] James has always followed the policy of the Queen of Hearts in ‘Alice in Wonderland’: Sentence first, verdict afterward. You can be certain that nobody involved in the Cornell U fraternity gang-bang circus is going to come out looking good, not the frat boys, not the girl, not the county DA, not New York AG Letitia James, and not NY Governor Kathy Hochul. The latter two have decided to showboat what has become a rape case in an election year when both are up for another four-year term.

First, the incident itself: October 19, 2024, a Saturday night when upstate New York is at its fall color peak and the campus is jumpin’, 20-year-old “Jane Doe” starts drinking at her sorority, Delta Delta Delta (Δ Δ Δ, “Tri-Delt”) whose motto is Let Us Steadfastly Love One Another. Around eleven o’clock Jane goes into downtown Ithaca to do more drinking at a bar. She’s legally underage, but manages to get served.

Meanwhile, messages are zinging around on social media, Snapchat, etc. There’s a party going on at the Chi Phi fraternity (ΧΦ). Jane communicates with one of the members there. He cordially invites her over for “a threesome.” Jane apparently has a reputation as a lively girl around campus. She accepts and heads over to Chi Phi with a load on, “five out of ten” on the intoxication scale, she later writes in a nine-page statement she gave to campus police.

She arrives at Chi Phi around midnight. More drinks. Pretty soon she’s in that threesome in a bedroom. The frat boys are also pretty hammered. Things get even wilder. Four other frat boys enter the picture. On top of the alcohol, they start doing ketamine, known to produce a dissociative “floaty, out-of-the-body feeling.” One’s judgment is not too good on it, even worse when mixed with booze. The scene at Chi Phi is Animal House plus. Various shenanigans ensue. Eventually, Jane Doe gets home.

Jane makes a whole lot of statements to her friends and sorority sisters after the incident. Law analyst Jonathan Turley tells The New York Post, “Friends recounted that Doe later laughed about the incident and said, ‘Oh my goodness, isn’t that crazy?’” She also “later told her sorority ‘Big sister’ that ‘You may hear some rumors about me, and unfortunately they are true.’”

Three days later she exchanged messages with one of the frat boys who expressed regret over “how things went down.” Jane reportedly texted back, “I really liked being with you,” and “none of the sexual stuff was illegal.” She added that she wanted to come over and smoke more “but, like, leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine.”

Five days after that, she got wind that Ch Phi was throwing a Halloween party, and asked to be invited. The threesome boy replied, “Chi Phi is your house and you are welcome here.” She texted back Tthank u i really appreciate...  i’ll bring my cigs tomorrow.” Did she mean cannabis? Shortly, the president of Chi Phi chapter texted her to cancel the invitation. Jane, pissed off, texted back, “I knew this was going to happen. The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Y'all aren’t my friends. Y'all are covering your asses.” A woman scorned...

A week after that - it’s November now - she reported the incident to campus police, but gave a muddled statement saying, she consented to the initial threesome, “Yeah, as much as I can because, again, I was super drunk when I got there. But I was pretty OK with all of this,” adding, “I can say with one hundred percent confidence I was raped.” You can suppose this was so, too, insofar as the ketamine she took probably launched her into a semi-hallucinatory state. Due to that muddle of intention and action in Jane Doe’s statements, the Tompkins County (NY) District Attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to prosecute the frat boys.

Anyway, that was then, 2024. Since then, Chi Phi’s chapter at Cornell was shut down. Fast forward two years. Jane Doe has now brought civil lawsuits against Cornell U and the seven Chi Phi frat boys, plus the Chi Phi national org, plus the Tri-Delt sorority, plus the bar in downtown Ithaca where Jane got hammered, plus unnamed faculty, alumni, and executive-board members. She alleges severe physical and psychological injury and says she later left Cornell.

A week ago, Tompkins County DA Van Houten reopened the criminal investigation. Then Governor Hochul stepped in and appointed AG Tish James “special prosecutor” for the state, taking the case away from DA Van Houten. Tish James, you might recall, initially ran for AG in 2022 by promising to go medieval on Donald Trump.

There’s a bit of a problem with the case: under New York State law, voluntary drinking and drug use that impairs judgment does not legally constitute an inability to consent to sexual activity. But leave it to Tish to figure out some way to skin this cat. She made good on her promise to haul Donald Trump into court in 2023 on a civil fraud rap (Judge Arthur Engoron presiding in the New York County (Manhattan) Supreme Court. It resulted in a roughly half-billion-dollar judgment. In August, 2025, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division tossed the half-billion-dollar judgment.

The New York Times has commenced its own inquisition against Cornell U. The coverage is essentially free campaign advertising for the unpopular Governor Hochul and for AG “Big Tish” James, who proudly presides over a New York State legal system that releases indicted violent repeat-offender felons with no bail so they are free to push people in front of on-rushing subway trains. Cornell President Michael I. Kotlikoff has made the requisite, weepy, handwringing statement, promising to do better. Everyone must now play his and her assigned roles in this psychodrama.

You wonder if it will turn out anything like the Duke U Lacrosse team rape case twenty years ago, where the DA who brought the case was disgraced and disbarred, the students implicated were all let off, and the girl who made the rape complaint admitted she lied and was later convicted on a murder rap. But not until after racking up millions in legal fees for the attorneys of all concerned. Our country..."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

Adventures With Danno, "We're Not Waiting, Stock Up Now"

Adventures With Danno, 10/5/26

"We're Not Waiting, Stock Up Now"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "I Want to Go Back to Normal"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 10/5/26

"I Want to Go Back to Normal"

"I want to go back to normal. In this video, Dan takes a hard look at the things we are increasingly being told to accept as normal in everyday life - from tipping everywhere we go and automated checkout machines asking for tips, to outrageous travel upgrades, rising costs, business closures, layoffs and an economy that seems to make everything more complicated and expensive. When did buying fast food, checking out at a stadium or simply going about your day turn into another opportunity to pay more?

This is a candid look at the economy, consumer spending, inflation, tipping culture, businesses struggling, job losses, the changing cost of living and the growing divide between what people can afford and what companies expect consumers to accept. Dan also talks about civility, common sense, preparing for difficult economic and weather conditions, and why sometimes we simply need to ask: Is this really normal? This is business news you can use, with a real-world look at what's happening to American consumers, workers and businesses."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Snyder Reports, 10/5/26"

Full screen recommended.

Snyder Reports, 10/5/26

"People Are Panic Buying Medicine & 

Toilet Paper Again - Should You?"

"People are panic buying gas and medicine again heading into winter - but should you? In this video I break down what's really happening with panic buying, $4.36 gas prices, $6.32 diesel, masks and toilet paper, and why economists are warning of sticker shock on heating oil prices this winter with bills up 50% or nearly $900. Stores still have product, this is not a nationwide food shortage like 2020, but smart emergency preparedness in September and October matters. Have you panic bought anything - toilet paper, water, food? Let me know in the comments what it was."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Economic Market Snapshot 10/5/26"

"Economic Market Snapshot 10/5/26"

Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

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"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 

You and I are not in the Big Club."

- George Carlin

o

Market Data Center, Live Updates:

- https://www.marketwatch.com/market-data 

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- https://www.asktraders.com/analysis/

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Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."

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- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

Job cuts and much more.

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

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- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

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- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

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- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

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Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

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"The more I see of the monied classes,

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...

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And now... The End Game...

o

"Economic Bubble Troubles Are Ready to Burst Everywhere"

"Economic Bubble Troubles Are Ready to Burst Everywhere"

by David Haggith

Excerpt: "From the most inflated housing bubble in history, which is beginning to settle from the sky… to a high-altitude stock bubble that is stretched so thin in the stratosphere it is ready to pop… to a sinking labor market that is starting to wobble and is ready to hit the ground… to a monetary inflation bubble that is evaporating in the heat… to the world’s biggest Treasury/bond bubble, which has become distorted and unstable, the entire US economy is exhibiting signs of going bust everywhere you look."

Full, highly recommended article is here:

- https://www.thedailydoom.com/

"It Has Begun: They Have Launched A New Military Operation Involving 100,000 Soldiers To Wipe Out The Houthis And Take Back Control Of Yemen"

by Michael Snyder

"The Great Middle East War has just entered a very dangerous new chapter. 100,000 troops under the control of the internationally-recognized government of Yemen are going to attempt to end the Houthi threat once and for all. Saudi Arabia will be assisting by conducting constant airstrikes on Houthi positions. In other words, all-out war is coming to the Arabian Peninsula. The United States will be providing intelligence and targeting data for this operation, but officials are telling us that the U.S. military will not be directly involved at this time. However, Axios is reporting that the U.S. could join the operation at a later date “should it go south”.

What this means is that there isn’t going to be an end to the Great Middle East war for a long time to come. One of Iran’s core demands has always been an end to the fighting on all fronts. Needless to say, what we are witnessing is the opposite of that. Even in the most wildly optimistic scenario, it would take months to totally defeat the Houthis.

In a televised speech, Yemeni President Rashad al-Alimi announced that this new military operation will continue “until the country is liberated from the grip of ‌the terrorist militia”… Yemen’s Saudi-backed, internationally recognized government said on Sunday it was launching a major ​military campaign to recapture all areas of the country controlled by the Iran-backed Houthis. The government’s armed forces would press the offensive “until the country is liberated from the grip of ‌the terrorist militia,” Yemeni President Rashad al-Alimi said in a televised address. A military spokesman later called on the Houthis to lay down their weapons.

The Houthis are crazed religious zealots. They will never, ever lay down their weapons. So there will be no surrender. The Houthis will fight until they are either wiped out or they are victorious. It appears that this will be the biggest conflict in the entire modern history of Yemen.

It is being reported that over 100,000 soldiers could be mobilized to battle the Houthis…More than 100,000 Yemeni troops could be mobilized in the offensive, depending on the scale, the officials all said. Riyadh has concluded it cannot enter new Yemeni peace negotiations with the Houthis while they remain in control of Bab al-Mandab, giving them significant global leverage, the Western diplomats and a Gulf official said.

The Houthis have a core group of around 20,000 to 30,000 dedicated fighters, but they can easily mobilize more. They have been in control of Yemen’s capital Sanaa since 2014, and all previous efforts to dislodge them have failed. Recently, they captured vast amounts of territory along the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and they haven’t been allowing Saudi oil tankers to travel through that very important chokepoint. Now the goal is to take it all back.

The U.S. was asked to join this military operation, but that request was denied. According to Axios, an anonymous U.S. official is insisting that our military “is not going to take kinetic action for now”…On Thursday, Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid Bin Salman called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to brief him on the planned operation and ask again for U.S. airstrikes against Houthi targets, the U.S. official said. A U.S. official said that the U.S. “is not going to take kinetic action for now.”

Last week, President Trump was close to ordering a strike on the Houthis after a request from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), but eventually decided to hold off. However, we will be assisting the operation by providing “intelligence and targeting data”… And apparently the door is being left open for the U.S. military to get involved in the operation at a future date “should it go south”…

The US could join Saudi Arabia’s operation against the Houthis should it go south, despite several previous refusals, Axios reported on Friday, citing American officials. The operation, expected to be launched in the coming weeks in response to the increased assault by the terrorist organization on Saudi Arabia as well as its storming of Bab al-Mandab, will be led by Saudi-backed Yemeni forces on the ground and supported by Saudi air strikes.

I think that there is a very good chance that the operation will not go well. The Houthis have had the upper hand for weeks, and in the last 48 hours they got even closer to Yemen’s third largest city… In the last 48 hours, the Houthis have also made gains against government and local forces on strategic hilltops near Yemen’s Taiz, military sources said, advancing on the last road between the city and Aden on the southern coast. Houthi control over the Taiz-Aden road would lead to an effective siege of the city, Yemen’s third-largest, inhabited by hundreds of ⁠thousands of civilians ​and where thousands of government forces are also stationed. The fall of Taiz would be catastrophic for Yemen’s internationally-recognized government.

I don’t think that Saudi Arabia was eager for an all-out war with the Houthis, but at this stage they probably felt that they had no choice. So now that one of their key allies is faced with all-out war, how will the Iranians respond? Will they just sit on their hands as the Houthis get pummeled, or will they take action? We shall see.

On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned Iran’s enemies that his nation is prepared to strike back “stronger than before”… “If our enemies again choose the path of military confrontation, our response will be stronger than before, and we will defend ourselves with even more force,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said at a gathering of foreign ambassadors. “There is no military solution, nor any solution based on new sanctions,” he continued, adding “only negotiations based on justice and fairness” could end the conflict.

If the Houthis are able to hold their own, the Iranians may not get directly involved in what is happening on the Arabian Peninsula. But if the Houthis start losing ground, Iran may feel compelled to intervene. In any event, it has become clear that there will be no peace. The Great Middle East War will be three years old this week, and now it has escalated to yet another new level. The death and destruction that we have already witnessed has shocked the world, but much worse is coming."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com