Editor’s Note: The article below is from International Man, a publication that is often adversarial to American exceptionalism and the unipolar worldview. While we obviously disagree with the attacks on the U.S. “empire,” it’s important information. Moreover, the conclusions are worthwhile points of discussion. We don’t agree with the tone, but the trail this article highlights marks a necessity for further exploration.
We’re big boys and girls, not leftists. We can sift through the harsh words to find the important gems of knowledge. With that said, here’s Chris MacIntosh from International Man…
While we are all having our attention directed towards the war with Iran, we should always be looking at the “why.” Keeping in mind the absolutely true adage that all wars are bankers’ wars, I noted this from ZeroHedge.
So while we’re being directed towards the Middle East, I note the easing of the capital rule on banks. This — together with the war — are absolutely totally part of the same equation, despite the fact that not one in a 100 folks will ever know it or realize it, and for that very reason it will progress. Here is the problem…
The US government has quietly initiated a stealth liquidity backdoor for banks by easing capital requirements on Treasury trades. This means:
- Banks no longer need to reserve as much capital when holding or trading US government debt, making banks dodgier than they already are.
- They can now soak up more Treasury issuance without showing increased risk on their balance sheets, making banks dodgier than they already are.
- This injects artificial demand into the Treasury market and helps paper over collapsing organic demand while making banks dodgier than they already are.
This is not a mere policy shift. It’s a quiet declaration of structural stress.
What this really means is that the Treasury market, the backbone of the current financial system, is now so fragile and overburdened with issuance that it can no longer function without regulatory distortion.
- The US government is now issuing a whopping $1–2 trillion in new debt every quarter.
- Foreign buyers like China and Japan are net sellers.
- Domestic demand for treasuries is not keeping up.
- Yields are becoming increasingly unhinged from real risk.
I’d always thought they’d tap the boomers’ capital sitting in pension funds, mandating percentages to be allocated to “safety” or some such hogwash, but this is a new one that I admit I did not see coming — they’re turning banks into forced buyers by changing the rules. Sneaky buggers!
It won’t be called yield curve control, but this is exactly what it is… and it stinks of desperation.
So where does the Iran distraction come in? Exactly here:
War is a cover for liquidity expansion. War equals narrative control. War is a moral justification for massive capital deployment. And war means optical deferral of systemic accountability (they screwed up biggie, but can’t admit to it, because by doing so we’d get a revolution). Far better to send the peasants into a meat grinder (worked in Ukraine).
The Iran “surprise” hype machine serves a dual purpose:
- Emotionally spike public attention away from the fact that the US is suffering from domestic insolvency.
- Creates a narrative for justifying increased military spending and debt expansion, all under the guise of national security. The deep state truly is in control.
They’re not trying to hide the debt anymore. They’re trying to normalize the next phase of collapse by staging urgency elsewhere.
The United States is entering a phase where the legitimacy of the dollar system depends entirely on manufacturing belief. And when belief wanes, control mechanisms shift from fiscal logic to memetic warfare.
This is why capital rules are being gutted in silence, all the while state media channels scream about “world-changing surprises” (Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill) and existential threats (Russia bad, Iran bad, yadda, yadda, yadda). It is simply another step in the process of a failing empire.
It really may be a very good time to explore moving retirement money into a Gold IRA by Augusta Precious Metals. Just sayin’.
International Man Ad: As the fog of war thickens and financial smoke screens grow more elaborate, understanding the real drivers behind the chaos is no longer optional — it’s essential. Beneath the surface of the headlines lies a deliberate engineering of collapse, disguised as policy, wrapped in distraction.
If this article resonated with you — if you sense, deep down, that something far more profound is unraveling beneath the theater of geopolitics — then it’s time to dig deeper.
We’ve prepared a special PDF report, Clash of the Systems: Thoughts on Investing at a Unique Point in Time, to help you see what’s coming and how to position yourself accordingly. It outlines the seismic shifts underway in the global order — and where smart capital goes when empires fall.
Click here to download the report now.
Understand the collapse. Prepare for the transition. Position yourself before the dust settles.
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.
