(The Economic Collapse Blog)—U.S. Treasury bonds are supposed to be among the most stable financial instruments in the entire global financial system. When they begin to trade like memecoins, that is a very clear indication that the next major financial crisis has arrived. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted that he would be able to keep bond yields under control. Obviously that did not happen. Now we have a gigantic mess on our hands, and it is going to affect every man, woman and child in this country.
When bond yields soar, so do mortgage rates.
The national average for a 30 year fixed mortgage has risen to a whopping 7.54 percent.
Do you understand what this is going to do to the housing market?
Good luck if you want to buy a home.
Good luck if you want to sell a home.
And if you have an adjustable rate mortgage, you should be bracing for a lot of pain.
Credit card rates and auto loan rates are going to go up too.
The era of “easy borrow, easy spend” is coming to a crashing halt.
This will directly impact all of us.
Needless to say, it is going to be a lot more expensive for the federal government to borrow money too.
We are already spending way over a trillions dollars a year just on interest on the national debt, and so there is no way that we can afford for bond yields to spike.
But it is happening anyway.
Banks and financial institutions all over the nation are holding gobs and gobs of U.S. Treasuries.
They were supposed to be extremely safe investments.
But when bond yields soar to crazy levels, bond prices crash.
As a result, banks and financial institutions from coast to coast now have balance sheets that look like horror movies.
Is your bank at risk of failing?
You might want to look into that.
The stage is also being set for a derivatives meltdown of epic proportions.
If bond yields continue to skyrocket, we are going to see things happen in the derivatives marketplace that we have never seen before.
I am talking about the type of scenario where analysts are using words like “nuclear” and “apocalypse” to describe what is occurring.
Are you starting to understand what is at stake?
We desperately, desperately need bond yields to stop rising.
But that isn’t likely to happen, is it?
According to the Wall Street Journal, 10 year U.S. Treasures and 30 year U.S. Treasuries both rose to “their highest levels since 2002” yesterday…
Today is the final day of a quarter that’s been marked by a relentless selloff in government bonds.
The rout has driven U.S. Treasury yields—which move inversely to prices—to multidecade highs. Both the 10- and 30-year Treasury yields settled yesterday at their highest levels since 2002.
In 2002, the federal government was 6 trillion dollars in debt.
Today, the federal government is 40 trillion dollars in debt.
Big difference.
Today, things got even worse.
Just a little while ago, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries hit 5.302 percent…
To most Americans, this means absolutely nothing, because they don’t understand all of the stuff that I just shared with you above.
Of course it isn’t just 10 year U.S. Treasuries that have begun to trade like memecoins.
The charts for 20 year U.S. Treasuries and 30 year U.S. Treasuries look like they were pulled out of a video game…
This is not supposed to happen.
Ever.
The really bad news is that bond yields have been spiking all over the world.
Today was no different…
Many people see green and they think that must be a good sign.
But as those bond yields go up, bond prices are collapsing.
In France, the yield on 10 year bonds just rose to the highest level since 2008…
France’s messy politics are spooking the bond markets. On September 29th yields on ten-year bonds rose to 4.8%, their highest level since 2008. The surge in borrowing costs has pushed the spread between French ten-year bonds and German Bunds up by 44 basis points in September, to 122 points—the highest level for 14 years. France now pays more to borrow than Greece and Italy, once the euro zone’s most worrisome members. It is increasingly looking like the currency area’s biggest problem, and things could get worse.
Italy is also becoming an absolutely enormous problem.
Simultaneously, Europe is on the verge of a major financial meltdown, Japan is on the verge of a major financial meltdown, and the U.S. is on the verge of a major financial meltdown.
Which area of the world will spiral out of control first?
As borrowing costs rise and the global energy crisis intensifies, we are going to want to watch for signs that economic activity is slowing down.
For example, a lot of trucking companies in the U.S. are starting to file for bankruptcy…
More than a dozen American trucking companies have filed for bankruptcy in the past month, according to an industry news report.
Some 16 firms, accounting for more than 250 jobs, have filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 proceedings, FreightWaves reported earlier this month.
Diesel prices, the lifeblood of the trucking industry, hit a record average of $6.53 a gallon on September 22 amid the impact of President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. Diesel has increased $2.76 over the past year, according to motor club AAA.
The performance of the trucking industry often tells us where the economy as a whole is headed.
Without a doubt, the outlook for the months ahead is not promising at all.
We are facing a global energy crisis, a global fertilizer crisis, a global food crisis, a Super El Niño and World War III all at the same time.
Meanwhile, we continue to get hammered by one major natural disaster after another.
There are so many elements of “the perfect storm” that we are currently experiencing, and this storm is only going to get more intense as we move forward.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
