(The Epoch Times)—Economists are expressing greater optimism about the U.S. economy as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take the reins at the White House, with the latest National Association for Business Economics (NABE) survey showing that economists have raised their growth projections substantially for 2025 and most no longer see downside risks as predominant.
The periodic survey, released on Nov. 25, reveals an upward revision in economic growth projections for both this year and the next, compared to the last time the panel of 38 professional economic forecasters was polled in September. Specifically, the current forecast calls for real inflation-adjusted gross domestic product to increase by 2.7 percent in 2024, up from the 2.6 percent the panelists expected several months ago. The economists’ prediction for 2025 is even more optimistic, forecasting a 2.0 percent pace of growth, up 0.2 percentage points from the 1.8 percent growth they expected a few months before the November election.
“In addition, the largest share of respondents—44 percent—now sees the risks surrounding the outlook as balanced, whereas a majority of respondents in the previous survey thought downside risks were more likely than balanced or upside risks,” NABE president Emily Kolinski Morris said in a statement.
Most of the panelists also expect inflation to cool further, predicting that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) will slow to 2.3 percent in annual terms by the end of 2025, and the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, the core Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) price index, will come in at 2.1 percent by that time. Slowing inflation means more room for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which the panelists expect will take place “gradually but consistently.”
Fed policymakers focus more on core PCE, which excludes the volatile categories of food and energy, when assessing inflation trends as this gauge provides a more stable measure of underlying inflation pressures.
This week will see the release of PCE inflation data for October, with the latest report for September showing that core PCE remained unchanged from August at 2.7 percent year over year, although it jumped by 0.3 percent month over month, up from August’s 0.1 percent increase.
While the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s inflation nowcasting model indicates a near-term increase in core PCE inflation, it hints at a gradual decline later, aligning with the Federal Reserve’s latest Summary of Economic Projections, which foresees a downward trajectory for core PCE in both 2024 and 2025.
The Cleveland Fed’s inflation model, updated on Nov. 25, estimates that core PCE inflation rose to 2.76 percent in October and will have risen to 2.90 percent by the end of November. At the same time, the nowcast sees the core PCE month-over-month readings declining from 0.24 percent in October to 0.23 percent in November, suggesting the onset of a potential downward trend, which would be consistent with the view of the NABE economists and Fed officials.
In their latest Summary of Economic Projections, released in September, Fed policymakers expected core PCE to fall to 2.6 percent by the end of 2024, a drop from the 2.8 percent they projected in June. They also lowered their projections for core PCE in 2025, expecting it to come in at 2.2 percent, lower than the 2.3 percent they forecast during the summer and 0.1 percentage point higher than the NABE panel’s prediction for next year.
The increase in optimism about the future of the U.S. economy expressed by NABE forecasters dovetails with a jump in positive sentiment expressed by consumers and members of the business community alike.
The latest S&P Global Flash PMI survey of the manufacturing and service industries, released on Nov. 22, showed a broad-based improvement in year-ahead business confidence, which was particularly notable in U.S. factories, where it hit a 31-month high.
“The business mood has brightened in November, with confidence about the year ahead hitting a two-and-a-half year high,” Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said in a statement. “The prospect of lower interest rates and a more pro-business approach from the incoming administration has fueled greater optimism, in turn helping drive output and order book inflows higher in November.”
The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey, released on Nov. 22, showed an uptick in consumer confidence, while year-ahead inflation expectations eased.
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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.
