(The Economic Collapse Blog)—2025 has truly been a historic year. No matter which side of the fence that you are on, nobody can deny that we have witnessed seismic political changes over the last 12 months. Meanwhile, the AI revolution is transforming our lives in ways that we don’t even understand. But despite all of our advanced technology, we can’t stop the endless barrage of natural disasters that has been pummeling us in 2025, and hunger continues to spread all over the globe. Of course war has been a major theme from the very beginning of the year to the very end of the year. Humanity has been facing one major crisis after another, and people are steadily getting angrier and more frustrated.
Our world is changing at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking. If you always wanted to live in “interesting” times, you have certainly gotten your wish. The following are 30 numbers from 2025 that are almost too crazy to believe…
#1 As 1999 began, a Gallup survey found that 70 percent of Americans were satisfied with how things were going in the United States. As 2025 ends, only 24 percent of Americans are satisfied with how things are going in the United States.
#2 In 1980, the fact that the U.S. national debt had reached a trillion dollars was a really big deal. But now our national debt has surpassed the 38 trillion dollar mark and there is seemingly no end in sight.
#3 Globally, the total amount of debt in the world has reached an almost unbelievable total of 337 trillion dollars.
#4 In 2025, more than half of all of the nations on the entire planet were either directly involved in military conflict or were funding it.
#5 At the start of 2025, you could purchase an ounce of silver for about 30 dollars. As 2025 ends, an ounce of silver will cost you more than 70 dollars.
#6 Crypto investors lost about $800,000,000,000 during the month of November alone.
#7 After all this time, the Department of Justice is claiming that they have just “discovered” a million more Epstein documents.
#8 In 2025, researchers in the United States and South Korea developed a version of the bird flu that has a 100 percent death rate in mammals.
#9 According to the latest National Customer Rage Survey, 77 percent of U.S. consumers say that they have had a product or service problem within the last 12 months. That is a brand new all-time record high.
#10 Earlier this year, we witnessed 494 earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or greater within a 30 day period. That was about 4 times as many earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or greater than we normally experience in a typical month.
#11 Globally, natural disasters caused a total of $120,000,000,000 in economic damage in 2025.
#12 The number of Americans that are dealing with food insecurity has almost doubled since 2021.
#13 The United Nations is warning that nearly 10 percent of the entire population of the globe is now going to bed hungry each night.
#14 Approximately 1.2 million foreign students are currently attending colleges and universities in the United States. How many U.S. students have been denied admission in order to make room for those students at our best schools?
#15 In 2019, you could get a cheeseburger at McDonald’s for a dollar. Today, the average price of a cheeseburger at McDonald’s is $3.15.
#16 Since 2019, the annual income needed to afford a median-priced home in rural U.S. counties has more than doubled.
#17 According to a survey that was conducted by PNC Bank, 67 percent of U.S. workers are now living paycheck to paycheck.
#18 Investopedia has determined that it now takes approximately 5 million dollars to live the American Dream over the course of a lifetime.
#19 One study discovered that approximately 42 percent of Americans that belong to Generation Z have been diagnosed with “anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD” or some other mental health condition.
#20 One recent survey found that 70 percent of U.S. adults are currently taking at least one pharmaceutical drug, and nearly a quarter of U.S. adults are currently taking at least four pharmaceutical drugs.
#21 According to the CDC, an American now dies by suicide every 11 minutes.
#22 Approximately 20 percent of high school students in the United States have had a relationship with an AI chatbot.
#23 One recent survey found that almost two-thirds of all church leaders that prepare sermons “use AI tools in their sermon writing process”.
#24 Well over 50 percent of the global population lives in a nation where Christians are being violently persecuted.
#25 U.S. farmers are facing the worst economic downturn that they have experienced in at least 50 years.
#26 The size of the U.S. cattle herd has dropped to the lowest level in about 75 years.
#27 According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. employers have announced a grand total of almost 1.2 million job cuts in 2025.
#28 The McKinsey Global Institute is warning that approximately 40 percent of all U.S. workers could potentially be replaced by AI.
#29 In more than 50 percent of the nations on the entire planet, the total fertility rate is now below replacement level.
#30 A recent YouGov survey discovered that nearly half of the U.S. population believes that a nuclear war is likely within the next 10 years.
The pace of global events has accelerated significantly over the past year. It really does feel like we are building up to some sort of a crescendo. We are living at a time of a “perfect storm”, and we just keep getting hammered by one crisis after another.
As a result, much of the population has become numb to it all. Never before in human history have we been subjected to such an emotional overload. When you are being pulled in so many directions emotionally, it can be really easy to give in to the temptation to go numb.
But I would encourage my readers not to do that. It is when times are the darkest that light is needed the most. As things get even darker in 2026, choose to be a light to those around you. All of human history has been building up to this time, and we get to be here for it.
There is nowhere else that I would rather be than right here, and there is no other time that I would have rather lived than right now.
Don’t let all of the chaos that is going on all around us get you down. You were born for such a time as this, and now is the time to become everything that you were created to be.
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.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
