(Zero Hedge)—The US Federal Reserve’s decision to ease monetary policy is inflating an economic bubble that could drive up the prices of hard assets, but also marks the final phase of a 75-year economic cycle, according to former hedge fund manager Ray Dalio.
Typically, as CoinTelegraph’s Vince Quill reports, the Federal Reserve typically eases interest rates when economic activity is stagnating or declining, asset prices are falling, unemployment is high and credit dries up, as seen during the Great Depression of the 1930s or the 2008 financial crisis,
However, as Dalio wrote in an article posted to X this week, the Fed is now easing monetary policy at a time of low unemployment, economic growth and rising asset markets, Dalio wrote, which is typical of late-stage economies saddled with too much debt.
This “dangerous” combination is more inflationary, Dalio wrote, warning investors to keep an eye on upcoming fiscal and monetary decisions.
“Because the fiscal side of government policy is now highly stimulative, due to huge existing debt outstanding and huge deficits financed with huge Treasury issuance – especially in relatively short maturities – quantitative easing would effectively monetize government debt rather than simply re-liquify the private system.”
The continued inflationary pressure and currency debasement are positive catalysts for Bitcoin, gold and other store-of-value assets, which are seen as hedges against macroeconomic and geopolitical risks, including a reset of the global monetary order.
This Time is Different Because the Fed Will be Easing into a Bubble.
While I would expect the mechanics to work as I described, the conditions in which this QE would take place are very different from those that existed when they took place before because this time the easing will be into a bubble rather than into a bust.
More specifically, in the past QE was deployed when:
- Asset valuations were falling and inexpensive or not overvalued.
- The economy was contracting or very weak.
- Inflation was low or falling.
- Debt and liquidity problems were large and credit spreads were wide.
- So, QE was a “stimulus into a depression.”
Today, the opposite is true:
- Asset valuations are at highs and rising. For example, the S&P 500 earnings yield is 4.4% while the 10-year Treasury bond nominal yield is 4% and real yields are about 1.8%, so equity risk premiums are low at about 0.3%.
- The economy is relatively strong (real growth has averaged 2% over the last year, and the unemployment rate is only 4.3%).
- Inflation is above target at a relatively moderate rate (a bit over 3%) while inefficiencies due to deglobalization and tariff costs are exerting upward pressures on prices.
- Credit and liquidity is abundant and credit spreads are near record lows.
So, QE now would not be a “stimulus into a depression” but rather a “stimulus into a bubble.”
Let’s look at how the mechanics typically affect stocks, bonds, and gold.
Because the fiscal side of government policy is now highly stimulative (due to huge existing debt outstanding and huge deficits financed with huge Treasury issuance especially in relatively short maturities) QE would effectively monetize government debt rather than simply re-liquify the private system.
That’s what makes what is happening different in ways that seem to make it more dangerous and more inflationary.
This looks like a bold and dangerous big bet on growth, especially AI growth, financed through very liberal looseness in fiscal policies, monetary policies, and regulatory policies that we will have to monitor closely to navigate well.
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With a lag it should be expected to raise inflation from what it otherwise would have been.
When the Fed and/or other central banks buy bonds, it creates liquidity and pushes real interest rates down as you see in the chart below.
What happens next depends on where the liquidity goes.
- If it stays in financial assets, it bids up financial asset prices and lowers real yields so multiples expand, risk spreads compress, and gold rises so there is “financial asset inflation.” That benefits holders of financial assets relative to non-holders so it widens the wealth gap.
- It typically passes to some degree into goods, services, and labor markets raising inflation. In this case, with automation replacing labor, the extent to which this will happen would seem to be less than typical. If it stimulates inflation enough that can lead nominal interest rates to rise to more than offset the decline in real interest which then hurts bonds and stocks in nominal terms as well as in real terms.
If real yields fall because of QE but inflation expectations rise, nominal multiples can still expand, but real returns erode.
It would be reasonable to expect that, similar to late 1999 or 2010-2011, there would be a strong liquidity melt-up that will eventually become too risky and will have to be restrained.
During that melt-up and just before the tightening that is enough to rein in inflation that will pop the bubble is classically the ideal time to sell.
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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.
