Tag Archives: Food prices

Putin Says US Decision To Print Money Is Behind Soaring Food Prices, by Tyler Durden

Posted on June 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

Putin’s pronouncements about America’s economic woes are more accurate than anything coming out of the mouths of American politicians. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Earlier, we reported on the deranged, confused, false ramblings of a senile old man who is so out of his depth in running the world’s biggest economy, the catastrophic results will soon be obvious to even his most die-hard fans. Now, it’s time for his nemesis on the world scene, Russia’s Vladimir Putin to respond.

Speaking in a TV interview on Friday evening, following a meeting with African leaders in Sochi, Putin accused Western leaders of trying “to shift the responsibility for what is happening in the world food market” and said that “restrictions imposed by the US and its allies against Russia and Belarus will only exacerbate the looming global food crisis by affecting fertilizer trade and sending the food prices further up.”

Instead of looking toward Russian, Putin said that the root causes of the crisis lie with the US decision to print record amounts of money which led to an increase in global food prices, as well as Europe’s over-reliance on renewables and short-term gas contracts, which have led to price hikes and rising inflation.

“It began to take shape as early as February 2020 in the process of combating the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic,” he added.

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Doug Casey on Food Riots and “Inflation Lockdowns”

Posted on April 22, 2022 | Leave a comment

Sooner or later, food riots will spread to Western countries. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

Inflation Lockdowns

International Man: Recently, we’ve seen people riot over rising prices—especially food prices—in Sri Lanka, Peru, and other countries.

What is going on here?

Doug Casey: Commodity prices have generally gone up close to 100% in the last year. Soybeans ($17), wheat ($11), and corn ($8) are all at or near all-time highs—and they’re not coming down. Why not? Mainly because of the trillions of currency units printed by central banks in the last year or so. Their prices are now at a new equilibrium level. But there are other reasons besides money printing.

Wheat, soybeans, and corn are basic for feeding people and animals around the world—certainly in the Western world. They’ve become much more expensive to produce. In today’s era of industrial agriculture, fertilizer is of critical importance. All of the main fertilizers—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium compounds—have tripled or more.

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Worsening Food Price Increases Gain Global Attention – UN Food and Agriculture Organization Tracks Highest Prices Ever Recorded, by Sundance

Posted on April 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

As the sanctions backfire and the Ukraine-Russia war continues, expect food prices to go even higher. Some people are going to starve. From Sundance at theconservativetreehouse.com:

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported on Friday they are recording the highest Food Price Index since they started recording thirty years ago. With record highs in prices for cereals, vegetable oils, dairy and meats

This issue has been a slow burning fuse toward the biggest powder keg in modern history, and it is about to get very serious.  We have been warning about it since last fall {Go Deep}.  In the most deliberate and painstaking ways possible, we have been urging everyone to take this issue seriously.

The background cause is complex and started with the 2020 government response to the pandemic.  U.S. and international government intervention in the food supply process has been FUBAR from the beginning. Every action taken since early 2020 has been one bad policy after another; building failure upon failure, crisis upon crisis, bad decision upon bad decision, bringing us to a precipice summed up by saying “the absence of food will change things.”

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The end of fiat hoving into view… by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on March 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

Skyrocketing food and energy prices, rising interest rates, crashing financial markets, and economic depression will spell the end of Western fiat currencies. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

Tragic though the situation in Ukraine has become, the real war which started out as financial in character some time ago has now become both financial and about commodities. Putin made a huge mistake invading Ukraine but the West’s reaction by seeking to isolate Russia and its commodity exports from the global marketplace is an even greater one.

Furthermore, with Ukraine being Europe’s breadbasket and a major exporter of fertiliser, this summer will bring acute food shortages, worsened by China having already accumulated the bulk of the world’s grains for its own population. Inflation measured by consumer prices has only just commenced an accelerated rise.

Because they discount falling purchasing power for currencies, rising interest rates, and collapsing bond prices are now inevitable. Being loaded up with bonds and financial assets as collateral, the consequences for the global banking system are so significant that it is virtually impossible to see how it can survive. And if the banking system faces collapse, being unbacked by anything other than rapidly disappearing faith in them fiat currencies will fail as well.

Unforeseen financial and economic consequences

Back in the 1960s, Harold Wilson as an embattled British Prime Minister declared that a week is a long time in politics. Today, we can also comment it is a long time in commodity markets, stock markets, geopolitics, and almost anything else we care to think of. The rapidity of change may not be captured in just seven calendar days, but in recent weeks we have seen the initial pricking of the fiat currency bubble and all that floats with it.

This is turning out to be an extreme financial event. The background to it is unwinding of economic distortions. Through a combination of currency and credit expansion and market suppression, the difference between state-controlled pricing and market reality has never been greater. Zero and negative interest rates, deeply negative real bond yields, and a deliberate policy of artificial wealth creation by fostering a financial asset bubble to divert attention from a deepening economic crisis in recent years have all contributed to the gap between bullish expectations and market reality.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, War

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Here’s why Rising Food Prices are here to stay, by Simon Black

Posted on February 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

There are worker shortages and agricultural input prices are soaring. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

On the morning of October 5, 1789, dozens of women were looking for food at an outdoor market in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine neighborhood of Paris.

But the store shelves were nearly empty. Bread in particular– a staple of the French diet– was in critically short supply. And what little bread the shops did have available was being sold for sky-high prices.

This was nothing new for French peasants; the government had mismanaged the economy so poorly that food supplies had been falling (and bread prices rising) for several years.

There had even been food riots and protests going back more than a decade to the mid 1770s. But the situation only worsened.

People finally reached their breaking point that October morning in 1789, when a single young woman standing in corner of the marketplace began beating a drum, signaling the other women that it was time for another protest.

As they marched through the streets, more and more supporters joined, with some estimates as high as 10,000 people.

Their first stop was City Hall in Paris, located at the Hotel de Ville; there, officials opened grain reserves to feed the protesters. But the mob’s anger wasn’t quenched.

At this point they didn’t just want bread, or even a single meal. They wanted revolution. So from there they set out to Versailles, the King’s palace outside of Paris.

It took them about six hours to reach Versailles, where, that evening, King Louis XVI met personally with some of the protest leaders.

He made promises to give them more food, then later announced that he would voluntarily relinquish some of his power and accept a new bill of rights for the French people.

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President Biden’s New Plan to Tackle Rising Food Prices, by MN Gordon

Posted on September 24, 2021 | 1 comment

Rising food prices and a depreciating currency have brought down more than one regime. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

Watch it slip
Watch it slide
I bet $10 on the losing horse
Feel the grip
Of my bride
Watch me do it again

Where’s my dinner?!

– Short Lip Fuser, Rocket from the Crypt

Empty Stomachs

Evergrande’s going down.  And it’s taking the life savings of countless good people down with it.

But while Evergrande’s going down.  Food prices are going up.  Moreover, they’re going up a lot.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global food prices were up nearly 33 percent year over year in August.  Vegetable oil, grains, and meat all cost more.  Unfortunately, rising food prices – and empty stomachs – often presage social chaos and revolution.

If you recall, a decade ago food inflation triggered the Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa.  And food shortages were commonplace in Communist Romania in the 1980s.  That was before the country’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown, tried by a kangaroo court, lined up against a wall, and executed by firing squad on Christmas Day in 1989.

Rare is the revolution ignited by a populace with a full stomach.  Historically, surges against an oppressive regime are sparked by a steep and extended rise in food prices.

Leading up to the French Revolution, for example, famines were frequent.  In one instance, when Louis XVI’s clueless wife, Marie Antoinette, learned the peasants had no bread, she remarked, “let them eat cake.”

What followed were the Flour War riots.  Not long after that, Louis XVI’s head rolled off the guillotine chopping block.  Then things really got bad.

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What Will You Do When Inflation Forces U.S. Households To Spend 40 Percent Of Their Incomes On Food? by Michael Snyder

Posted on May 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

Perhaps we’ll eat less, or eat lower quality food. Inflation is showing up at the grocery stores big time, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be “transitory.” From Michael Snyder at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:

Did you know that the price of corn has risen 142 percent in the last 12 months?  Of course corn is used in hundreds of different products we buy at the grocery store, and so everyone is going to feel the pain of this price increase.  But it isn’t just the price of corn that is going crazy.  We are seeing food prices shoot up dramatically all across the industry, and experts are warning that this is just the very beginning.  So if you think that food prices are bad now, just wait, because they are going to get a whole lot worse.

Typically, Americans spend approximately 10 percent of their disposable personal incomes on food.  The following comes directly from the USDA website…

In 2019, Americans spent an average of 9.5 percent of their disposable personal incomes on food—divided between food at home (4.9 percent) and food away from home (4.6 percent). Between 1960 and 1998, the average share of disposable personal income spent on total food by Americans, on average, fell from 17.0 to 10.1 percent, driven by a declining share of income spent on food at home.

Needless to say, the poorest Americans spend more of their incomes on food than the richest Americans.

According to the USDA, the poorest households spent an average of 36 percent of their disposable personal incomes on food in 2019…

As their incomes rise, households spend more money on food, but it represents a smaller overall budget share. In 2019, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $4,400 on food (representing 36.0 percent of income), while households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $13,987 on food (representing 8.0 percent of income).

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The Global Inflation Nightmare That You Have Been Warned About Is Here, by Michael Snyder

Posted on March 4, 2021 | 1 comment

Inflation means inflation whatever passes for the money supply. Inflation has varying effects on the general price level and on specific prices. That said, if you inflate the money supply like developed world governments and their central banks have been doing the last year, it’s a pretty good bet that it will drive up most prices. From Michael Snyder at themostimportantnews.com:

If you thought that authorities all over the planet could print, borrow and spend money like there was no tomorrow without any consequences, you were being delusional.  Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we have witnessed the greatest monetary binge in world history.  Of course that was going to cause enormous problems.  Of course that was going to cause nightmarish inflation.  Anyone with an ounce of common sense should have been able to see that.  When the value of money is tied to nothing, “more money” is always such a tempting solution for those in power.  But as history has demonstrated over and over again, going down that path almost always leads to tragedy.

In our case, it will be the poorest people on the planet that suffer the most.  According to Bloomberg, basic food staples are dramatically spiking in price all over the globe…

Global food prices are going up, and the timing couldn’t be worse.

In Indonesia, tofu is 30% more expensive than it was in December. In Brazil, the price of local mainstay turtle beans is up 54% compared to last January. In Russia, consumers are paying 61% more for sugar than a year ago.

And as Albert Edwards has pointed out, annual inflation in cereals has hit 20 percent, which represents “the highest annual rise since mid-2011 when the Arab Spring was in full flow!”

If prices continue to rise like this, it is just a matter of time before we see widespread food riots all over the globe.

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