(End of the American Dream)—An obsession with green energy has the German economy on the brink of collapse. Germany has foolishly been chasing a dream of achieving net greenhouse gas neutrality by 2045, and this has taken a very heavy toll on the German economy. German GDP contracted in 2023, and it appears that it will contract again in 2024.
The manufacturing sector is dealing with the greatest crisis that it has faced since the 1940s, the big banks are struggling, and the coalition that was running the government has collapsed. Did David Wilkerson see what was going to happen all the way back in the 1970s?
Something that Steve Quayle posted the other day got me thinking, and so I decided to look into it. In Wilkerson’s book entitled “The Vision”, he stated that he was shown “economic confusion striking Europe first” during a period of great economic turmoil for the whole world. In a subsequent sermon, he was even more specific. In fact, in that sermon he specifically stated that the collapse that he saw would “start in Germany”…
To give some background, first, in his book, “The Vision,” at the beginning of chapter 1, Wilkerson states, “I see total economic confusion striking Europe first, and then affecting Japan, the United States, Canada, and all other nations shortly thereafter.”
So, the economic collapse begins in Europe. There is a slightly different version of this which is circulating on various sites on the internet, usually titled “David Wilkerson’s Economic Vision.” This is the one you quoted, where he narrates how the collapse starts in Europe, spreads to South America, then Mexico, then the U.S. Notice he again mentions Europe first, and then later, “the first country (that) goes bankrupt,” but doesn’t identify the country. Well, I did some more digging and found this audio sermon by Wilkerson:
AT EXACTLY 2:03 (see audio below) HE STATES: “It’s going to start in GERMANY!!!” After that he says it will “spread to Japan, and finally to the U.S.”
You can actually listen to David Wilkerson say these things with your own ears in this YouTube video…
Could it be possible that what Wilkerson warned us about so many years ago is starting to happen right in front of our eyes?
For the past few years, Germany’s economic performance has been absolutely horrible…
The world’s third-largest economy has lagged the European Union average since 2021 and is expected to shrink for the second year running in 2024, making it the worst performer among the Group of Seven major economies.
According to an article that was posted on ABC News, there are several reasons why the German economy has been struggling so deeply…
German industry still has not fully recovered from the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then came Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which led Germany and other Western countries to cut themselves off from Russian gas and oil. Competition from China, including its electric vehicles, has meanwhile forced German and other and European carmakers to lower production and lay off workers.
Of course that article did not even mention the radical green agenda that Germany has implemented, but many are convinced that it is the primary factor for the economic decline that we have been witnessing.
At one time, Volkswagen was an unstoppable economic powerhouse, but now it is talking about closing factories and laying off workers…
Nothing better encapsulates the negativity gripping Germany than what’s happening at Volkswagen, the biggest employer in Europe’s largest economy. The spillover effect of the crisis at Volkswagen, which is looking to shut down as many as three factories in Germany — the first ever shuttering of units in its 87-year history — is showing up in the fractures in Germany’s politics now widening to a chasm.
BASF is another German industrial giant that is facing major problems that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago…
BASF, for instance, a flagship of Germany’s industrial sector since 1865, symbolizes the nation’s manufacturing strength. With nearly 400 production sites across 80 countries, its heart remains in Ludwigshafen, Germany, where it operates a vast complex with 200 plants and employs around 39,000 people. However, this hub has recently become a focal point for BASF’s challenges.
Over the past two years, the company has shut down one of its two ammonia units and idled several others at this location due to their lack of competitiveness, resulting in the loss of 2,500 jobs, explains Chemical and Engineering News. BASF also experienced a significant decline in 2023, with sales dropping by 21.1% and adjusted earnings plunging by 60.1%. Adding to these woes, BASF recently announced plans to cut costs by an additional $1.1 billion in Ludwigshafen, foreshadowing further job cuts.
In my entire lifetime, we have never seen anything like this happen to Germany.
The politicians are desperate to turn things around, and a conflict about how to do that has resulted in the collapse of Germany’s ruling coalition…
Germany’s governing coalition has collapsed after disagreements over the country’s weak economy led Chancellor Olaf Scholz to sack his finance minister.
Christian Lindner’s dismissal prompted him to withdraw his Free Democrats Party (FDP) from a coalition with Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), leaving Scholz in a minority government with the Green Party.
Scholz said he would now call a confidence vote for January 15, which, if he lost, could allow elections to be held by the end of March next year – six months earlier than the elections planned for September 2025.
We shall see whether there is an election in March or not.
But meanwhile, there is fear that the collapse of the government will “deal another blow to consumption and investment in coming months”…
The coalition collapse is likely to deal another blow to consumption and investment in coming months, already poised to decline, with a third of German companies indicating in a recent survey plans to scale it back.
“In combination with the Trump win, economic confidence is likely to drop significantly and makes a contraction of the economy in the fourth quarter more likely,” said Carsten Brzeski, global head of macroeconomics at ING.
I do believe that governmental instability will accelerate the economic problems that the Germans have been experiencing.
And as more German businesses fail, I would watch the big banks very carefully. They have been on shaky ground for years, and it won’t take much to start pushing them over the edge.
Germany possesses the largest and most important economy in the entire European Union, and so once the German economy implodes the rest of the EU will feel an immense amount of pain too.
Wilkerson warned that the crisis would spread from Europe to Japan and then to the United States. And as I have warned for many years, it won’t be too long before the entire world is gripped by unprecedented economic turmoil.
So let’s keep a close eye on Germany.
I think that something is up.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” 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.
