(Mises)—Many historians labeled the twentieth century as the American century, with many metrics used. The end of the Cold War in 1989 and the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1991 changed world affairs: several new countries formed, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the economy of China rose, and many US military bases shut down. The twentieth century wound down with the US as the world superpower, and yet the vision of the 1990s was not clear for our political and military leaders going into the twenty-first century.
One definition of bankruptcy is “utter ruin, failure, depletion, or the like.” Entering the third decade of the twenty-first century with the perspective to see what has occurred since 2000 reveals this century is becoming the American bankruptcy. One US view of bankruptcy is when a private business, person, bank, government, or other nonprofit entity is financially unsound. Institutions, ethics, government, spirituality, education, etc. can also be bankrupt. Part of a prior Mises Wire article addressed two counties, one major metropolitan city and one territory, that went through and emerged from federal bankruptcy.
Many individuals, leaders in areas of public life, and foreign nations look to America for clarity and influence on culture, ethics, finance, governing, and public policy. The examples of ethical, financial, and governing bankruptcy show America is a shining example of utter failure.
Some of the largest bankruptcies of private businesses in federal courts since 2000 started with Pacific Gas and Electric in April 2001, $36 billion; Enron in December 2001, $65 billion; WorldCom in July 2002, $102 billion; Lehman Brothers in September 2008, $691 billion; General Motors in June 2009 (largest ever US automaker bankruptcy), $82 billion; and Lyondell Chemical in June 2009 (largest US petrochemical producer bankruptcy), $27 billion.
Four banks have filed for receivership by US bank regulators: Washington Mutual in September 2008, $327 billion; First Republic Bank in May 2023, $229 billion; Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023, $209 billion; and Signature Bank in March 2023, $110 billion. Of the 566 bank failures since the year 2000, Signature Bank is the only one to fail on a Sunday. Over 95 percent of bank failures occurred on Fridays.
Some famous US retailers have filed for bankruptcy since 2000 with some going out of business, like A&P supermarkets, Bed Bath & Beyond, Blockbuster, Borders, Compaq, Dressbarn, Family Christian Stores, Kmart, Lord and Taylor, Luby’s (Texas cafeteria chain), Modell’s Sporting Goods, Montgomery Ward, Payless ShoeSource, Pier 1 Imports, Radio Shack, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, Sears, Solyndra (solar panels), Sports Authority, Stein Mart, Theranos, Toys “R” Us, Tuesday Morning, and the Weinstein Company.
The coronavirus outbreak and the subsequent lockdowns brought about educational, financial, governing, medical, and policy bankruptcies at the local, state, and federal levels on a public scale not seen in many years. The results in each area will be felt for many years in children, education, families, finance, business, government, etc. with incredible unintended results too numerous to mention.
Fiat as a noun is defined by dictionary.com as “an authoritative decree, sanction, or order.” This word describes the currency issued by many central banks today. Fiat currency was issued to fund the federal government–authorized coronavirus financial relief programs on a breathtaking scale, showing the economic and governing bankruptcy on clear display. Two books written by Peter Schweizer, titled Clinton Cash and Secret Empires, detail the business, ethical, financial, and governing bankruptcy at the federal level on a scale where one should have trouble sleeping at night.
Boy Scouts of America filed for federal Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2020, amid the ongoing payouts of claims to victims tied to many years of child sexual abuse allegations, legal battles with insurance companies, and declining membership. They emerged from federal bankruptcy in March 2023, a greatly reduced organization with substantive reforms in place.
Many US Roman Catholic dioceses filed and emerged from federal Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to overwhelming monetary compensation paid to many victims of priest sexual abuse claims and diocesan cover ups. An Illinois Law Review paper published in 2013 reviewed Roman Catholic and Protestant churches that filed for federal Chapter 11 bankruptcy between 2006 and 2013.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy described in the Illinois Law Review shows it has the potential to offer religious organizations an avenue to rehabilitate their operations following economic downturns, failures and transitions in leadership, and standstills in negotiating with creditors.
Some common themes among these bankruptcies include poor leadership disconnected from their customers, followers, and members; leaders letting the power of their position go to their heads; using the group’s treasury as an unending source of money to fulfill their selfish desires; boards of directors, staff, and leaders who lacked courage to say the truth to their group’s leaders about what ailed their group; and lack of applying sound principles of budgeting.
Some outcomes from these federal Chapter 11 bankruptcies led to debt holders losing value, debt repayments being renegotiated with each lender, new renegotiated loans with a repayment plan being issued, some property liquidations occurring, etc. We must not forget the scale and depth of bankruptcy in its many forms which greatly infects the people and workings of the federal government and public policy in Washington, DC.
Many people in the US have come or are coming to the reality that many businesses, educational, government, nonprofit, and spiritual entities are bankrupt to their very core, financially and spiritually. The length, depth, and width of the twenty-first century American bankruptcy pierces deeply into most private and public institutions we see.
The sooner this bankruptcy reality is accepted, assessed, and addressed is where real healing and progress can begin, with some entities being retired and new ones formed to benefit the people they serve. Hopefully for some of these entities, this new post-bankruptcy reality will result in a newly created board of directors and staff who are more focused on those they serve. Some solutions will be initiated at the local level where situational understanding is best. The direction of each entity when it emerges from federal bankruptcy is hopefully humility, which hammers home the perspective that mistakes are made and can be learned from, moving forward with a focus to benefit families and communities.
About the Author
Stephen is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin and lives in Texas.
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.
