The timeline has accelerated. Again. But this time it’s different. I know I’ve said that before. This time I mean it. I know I’ve said that before too.
I have been issuing an economic collapse warning to the readers of The Belden Report since 2007. For eighteen years, mainstream economists have called me an alarmist. My brother-in-law Gerald has called me “the broken clock guy” at every Thanksgiving since 2012. Linda—my wife—stopped reading my newsletter that same year and has not resumed, despite multiple requests and one laminated copy I left on her nightstand in 2019.
Well. I want everyone to look at what is happening right now and tell me who was right.
A staff writer at The Atlantic published a piece this week noting that the U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, inflation hit 3%, economic growth cratered to 1.4%, and crude oil has surged past $114 a barrel. He compared the current moment to the stagflation of the 1970s—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. A mainstream publication. In The Atlantic. Saying what I have been saying since before most of these writers had email addresses.
The Crack-Up Boom Arrives
The Atlantic’s analysis gets the symptoms right. I will give credit where credit is due, even to a publication that has never once cited my work. The economy added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025—a tenth of the prior year. That is the most months of negative job growth since 2010, the depths of the Great Recession. The unemployment rate has climbed half a percentage point since January 2025. Growth slowed from 4.4% to 1.4% in a single quarter, with one full percentage point of that drop caused by a government shutdown. Prices are up 3% year-over-year, the highest since April 2024.
These are not the signs of a healthy economy. On this, the mainstream and I finally agree.
But here is where the writer and I part ways. He calls the current crisis “mostly self-inflicted”—blaming tariffs, blaming the war with Iran. This is the analysis of someone who studies economics at the surface level. Those of us who study Austrian economics understand that what we are witnessing is the inevitable consequence of decades of monetary expansion, credit manipulation, and the systematic destruction of sound money. The malinvestment was always going to unwind. The trigger is irrelevant. I said this in my Q4 2009 newsletter. Then I said it again in my Q2 2011 special edition. And again in my August 2015 “Red Alert” bulletin, my March 2018 “Final Warning” report, my Q1 2020 emergency assessment, and my February 2024 “Last Chance” issue. The timeline kept extending because the Fed kept intervening. But you cannot print your way out of reality forever.
An Economic Collapse Warning the Mainstream Can No Longer Ignore
The Atlantic writer notes that the 1970s crisis was triggered by the Arab oil embargo. Oil prices nearly quadrupled. Inflation hit double digits. The Fed hesitated to raise rates, making everything worse, until a new Fed chair finally jacked up interest rates to record levels and caused a deep recession with 11% unemployment.
This is exactly what I have been warning about. Not the oil part specifically. The systemic fragility part. When you build an economy on fiat currency and endless credit expansion, any external shock—any shock at all—can bring the whole structure down. It could have been oil. A pandemic could have done it. A housing bubble could have been the catalyst. In 2008, it was the housing bubble, and I predicted that. The fact that I also predicted the dollar would become worthless by 2009 and gold would hit $5,000 by 2012 is beside the point. My direction was correct. Fed intervention affected the timing.
Now Axios reports that the Strait of Hormuz disruption is “more than double the previous record set during the Suez Crisis.” Twenty percent of global oil supply, gone. WTI crude jumped 26.5% in a single session—the largest move in futures trading history dating back to 1983. Qatar’s energy minister says $150 a barrel is possible. The Nikkei dropped 7% overnight. South Korea’s market triggered circuit breakers. India’s rupee hit a half-century low.
I take no pleasure in this.
That is not entirely true. I take some pleasure in this. Not in the suffering—never in the suffering—but in the validation. Eighteen years of being called a crank. Eighteen years of Linda turning up the television when I try to explain what the Fed’s balance sheet means for her retirement. And eighteen years of Thanksgiving dinners where Gerald asks if I’m “still doing the gold thing” and then serves himself more stuffing like the global monetary system isn’t collapsing around his ears.
The Supply Chain Confirms What I’ve Always Said
The Washington Post published a devastating account this week of the cascading economic damage from the war. Dubai’s airport—the world’s busiest—closed, taking 20% of global airfreight capacity with it. Fifty-seven container ships trapped in the strait. Maersk suspending all cargo bookings in or out of seven countries. The CEO of a major Swiss logistics company told investors the situation is “similar to the covid times.” A logistics executive in Chicago described planes threading a narrow corridor between Iranian airspace and Russian airspace, saying “you can’t fly too north; you can’t fly too south.”
Mainstream economists will tell you this is a supply shock. They will tell you it is temporary and external. They will tell you the system was healthy before the war started. This is exactly what they said in 2019 when I warned that the repo market disruptions signaled deep structural rot. Same thing in 2021 when I warned that supply chain fragility was the canary in the coal mine of monetary decay. They repeated it in 2023 when I warned that the banking crisis was the opening chapter of the crack-up boom. They were wrong every time. The system is fragile because it is built on fiat currency. Sound money creates resilience. Printed money creates the illusion of resilience.
A Forbes analysis this week tried to put a ceiling on oil prices. With respect to Forbes, there is no ceiling. You cannot model the unraveling of a system that was never sound to begin with. I wrote a 4,200-word analysis of exactly this scenario for The Belden Report in November 2023. Eleven people read it. One of them was Gerald, who texted me “ok” with a period.
An Economic Collapse Warning You Can Still Act On
Yes, Gerald. OK. Gold is at $5,029 an ounce. My clients at Belden Sound Money Advisors who listened to my economic collapse warning are sitting comfortably right now. They have physical gold. Not paper gold. Not ETFs. Physical gold—no “gold-adjacent investment vehicles”—in their possession, in a safe that I recommended from a vendor I trust. The ones who didn’t listen are watching their 401(k)s evaporate while the president calls $114 oil “a very small price to pay” and the CEO of DHL says he needs to “constantly replan” because of how many drones are getting in.
Urea fertilizer prices are up 25%. Jet fuel in Europe is up 72%. South Korea’s market has lost 20% of its value. The native-born unemployment rate has risen half a percentage point since January 2025. A former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund is warning about “negative macroeconomic spillovers.” The Atlantic is drawing parallels to the 1970s. Even Barclays—Barclays!—is warning that production shut-ins “might spread to UAE and even Saudi Arabia.”
I have added all of this to the evidence wall in my office. Linda calls it “the crazy wall.” She is wrong. The wall contains seventeen framed charts, each one documenting a prediction that the mainstream said would never come true. Chart number four is from 2008. It came true. The other sixteen are still pending. But the timeline, as I have been saying, has accelerated.
The collapse is here. Subscribe to The Belden Report. Buy physical gold. Tell your financial advisor to read Austrian economics. And tell Linda I said she should call me back.
About the Author
