As a West Indian, I’ve lived through quite a few hurricanes in my time. My level of responsibility in each varied quite a bit. I was eight years old in my first hurricane and I thought it was great fun, as it was so exciting during the hurricane and, afterward, the landscape had changed so much that I had lots of new places to play.
On the other end of the scale, in 2004, my country, the Cayman Islands, experienced a Category 5 hurricane, with winds up to 200 miles per hour that sat on us without moving for 36 hours. I was responsible for ensuring that safety be provided for scores of my employees prior to the hurricane. After the storm, one of my companies took on the complete rebuilding of the country’s wholesale and retail food distribution facilities in order to ensure that the country’s population would have the most essential commodities—food and water. (A big change in level of responsibility over the years.)
In addition to having spent decades planning for hurricane damage, I’ve also spent decades as an economist, planning for major economic storms. In 1999, I determined that the world would experience what Doug Casey has termed a Greater Depression that would be more devastating than any economic event the world had ever seen. I predicted that it would happen in stages and that the final stage would be the most devastating. I would have been quite pleased to have been incorrect, but unfortunately, my predictions have come to pass. I believe we’re now quite close to the final destruction stage, a period that will lead to the collapse of many of the world’s formerly strongest economies, coinciding with a period of devastating warfare. In both the economic and warfare cases, those who are the world’s major players will believe that they’ll be able to control the extent of devastation and even profit from it, but events will go beyond their control and take on a life of their own.
As in the image above, there will not be just one, but multiple epicentres. Europe and North America will be hit the hardest economically. Next in line will be those countries, such as Japan, Australia, etc., that are the most closely linked economically with these centres. The next tier down will be those countries that are dependent on the centres, but more peripherally, such as Panama or Mexico. Finally, there will be those countries that are the least linked to the major centres, such as Uruguay or Thailand.
All countries will be impacted by the coming economic hurricane, but the effects will vary. Those in the US and Europe will experience the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. Those in Australia and Japan will experience a Category 4. Countries in the third tier will experience a Category 3, and those countries that are either distant from or the least economically dependent upon the epicentres will experience Category 2 or even Category 1 damage.
This is not mere speculation. In examining previous depressions and the last two world wars, we can see that those countries that were the least connected to events tended to fare well. This will hold true this time around as well.
When we turn on the television and the weatherman says that a hurricane is approaching, we have to make a decision. Do we trust in the hope that it might not pass directly over us? Do we question the severity of the storm as it’s being described to us? Should we plan to stay at home, as in a Category 1 or Category 2 storm, or should we plan to go to a local shelter as in a Category 3 or Category 4 storm? Or, do we believe we’ll be experiencing the devastation of a Category 5, in which case we’d pack our bags, wave goodbye to our home, and get as far away from the epicentre as possible?
Well, first, we’d better look at the categories, then, based on where we’re located, ask ourselves what we need to do. We’re presently already experiencing Category 1 conditions.
- Category 1 Warfare: Minor civil disobedience and/or riots
- Category 1 Economics: Increased mortgage foreclosures, some strip-shop and mall closings, decreased spending overall
- Category 2 Warfare: Major civil disobedience, riots, and/or insurrection
- Category 2 Economics: The above, plus tariff wars, stock and bond market crashes
- Category 3 Warfare: Minor bombing and/or ground invasion
- Category 3 Economics: The above, plus minor inability of governments to pay entitlements, significant inflation, credit collapse
- Category 4 Warfare: Major bombing and/or ground invasion
- Category 4 Economics: The above, plus the end of the dollar as a reserve currency/end of the petrodollar, considerable inflation, short-term bank closures
- Category 5 Warfare: Nuclear destruction
- Category 5 Economics: The above, plus major inability of governments to pay entitlements, permanent closure of the majority of banks, currency collapse, confiscation of deposits, major internal capital controls
The above descriptions are not by any means comprehensive. They represent basic categories, to which many details can and should be added.
So, what should your personal plan be? Well, if you’re located in one of the epicentres (the EU and US), you might devise a plan to head out to the country, if you have a destination that you either own or rent. Then, depending on the severity of the storm, you may survive the damage. (A rural area is the equivalent of a hurricane shelter.) However, if you’re dependent on your government for income, you may not be able to survive a Category 3 storm. Even if your income is independent of your government, you may not be able to survive a Category 4 or 5 storm, as you’ll still be under the control of a collapsing system.
The closer you are to an epicentre, the worse the damage promises to be to you personally. And the stronger the hurricane, the greater the damage. It’s important to remember that personal preparedness will help, but the worse the state your government, infrastructure, local businesses and neighbours will be in, the more you’ll be impacted by their condition, even if you’re personally prepared.
As an example, those who choose to sit out a Category 5 monetary and/or warfare hurricane in Uruguay would be likely to fare quite well, just as the Europeans who went there during the world wars. (Very few of them returned after the wars, having found a better life abroad.)
In a Category 4 hurricane, life would be likely to remain relatively stable in areas such as the southeastern provinces of Mexico. In a Category 3, New Zealand might just be manageable.
However, in order to assess your personal situation, it would be advisable to have another look at the categories above and decide for yourself what degree of damage is likely in the near future, then make a personal assessment as to whether you’re willing to chance experiencing that level of damage.
We’ve passed the point of whether there’ll be a hurricane; we just can’t be sure how severe it’ll be. The winds are already picking up and those who choose to make a move will need to do so soon.
Article cross-posted from International Man.
IM’s Note: If you live in the US or the EU, expect the coming financial hurricane to be a Category 5. Think major currency collapses, big bank closures, and capital controls. In other words, total financial mayhem.
New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team share all the details in this urgent video. Click here to watch it now.
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.
