The president declares emergency intervention via a tariff retreat for a bellwether component that is now entering a crisis state of shortage.
Don’t let the stealth recession fool you. Just a quick look at the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow indicator shows how false were the hopes that Trump’s “golden era” would start to dawn with its shimmering halo emerging above the morning horizon during the spring of 2026. The Fed’s own projections for second-quarter real GDP growth just took a suicide leap off a huge, bubble-busting cliff:
That looks more like the golden sun took an unexpected plunge toward the sunset horizon to me.
The Fed’s GDPNow forecast tends to become more accurate at the end of the quarter as more real data starts to come in. While the Fed was posting ludicrous estimates in the face of a massive oil crisis that inflation-adjusted GDP would arrive in a hot-to-scorching range by US standards of 3-4% growth, the number just got real. It is, of course, still not fully real, even at this low level, because the government never factors out all inflation (for reasons I’ve covered repeatedly so won’t go into). So, the real, real number is negative.
Watch the videos below, and you’ll see major caverns opening up under the US economy right now that are sucking that downward:
- A huge revelation of the true state of the US labor market, which is deeply in recession for reasons that don’t show on the surface, helping to keep the stealth recession fully cloaked. (I plan to lay that out in a Deeper Dive at the end of the week because there are a lot of complexities to unravel there.)
- The now absolutely certain impact this summer of the largest energy crisis in history. One video and an article lay out what I’ve been saying about how critical the level of US oil reserves have become.
Trump declares imminent food “emergency”
If you don’t believe the energy crisis is as bad as the video below reports or as I’ve been saying it is because it hasn’t happened yet (even though I’ve been saying it would not happen yet), then look at the national emergency that President Donald J. Trump just declared:
I, Donald J. Trump […] do hereby declare an emergency TO EXIST with respect to the threats to the availability of sufficient supplies of fertilizers to meet expected agricultural demand. [My emphasis.]
If you’ve been reading The Daily Doom, you’ve seen the fertilizer emergency coming from a long way off. You know why it is a true emergency because it forebodes a food crisis, and you know why it is happening. So, it’s no surprise and should have been dealt with months ago. The president now says a food crisis is coming if we don’t take emergency action right away.
Within the president’s sudden declaration of a state of emergency, which he says demands “immediate” action, we find admission to troubles created by his tariffs as well as a big clue to the size and imminence of the overall energy crisis. You see, the cause of the fertilizer crisis is two-fold: The unavailability of phosphates, which the declaration addresses directly, is an artificially created tariff trouble. The unavailability due to “conflicts” that the president brings up refers to natural gas for producing the nitrogen component of commercial fertilizers. This immediate emergency is a bellwether for the full-on energy crisis.
The fact that the shortages are serious enough to get Trump to drop his tariff on a key fertilizer component from a major supplying nation in order to open the market up more is testimony to the destructive effect of tariffs on the US economy. He prizes his tariffs, so he doesn’t drop them easily, and he surely knows any time he does have to drop them looks like an argument against the tariffs.
The fact that Trump is doing this to help get the cost of fertilizers down for farmers is also testimony to a fact that he has perpetually denied, which is that American businesses (and ultimately consumers) pay for the tariffs. American farmers have become so strapped by rising costs due to tariffs and the oil crisis that the president is having to back off a tariff on phosphates to help get the price of fertilizers back down to earth.
The US Farm Bureau has reported that 70% of farmers cannot afford the amount of fertilizer they normally go through during the summer.
The president’s declaration acknowledges the severity of the problem, but attempts to deflect the blame by putting it vaguely on “disruptions” from conflicts and “trade actions” of other countries:
[The acknowledgement] “Fertilizers are an essential component of agriculture and food production. Producers of corn, soybeans, wheat, and a variety of other crops need phosphate fertilizers to ensure strong crop yields to feed the population. Food production is critical to human health, farm security, and to the function of major sectors of the economy, and even isolated interruptions in food production can have serious health and economic consequences. Robust and reliable food production is therefore critical to the economic and national security of the United States….
[The deflection] “Global supply chains for phosphate fertilizer and fertilizer inputs, including imports of such products into the United States, have been disrupted in recent months by, among other things, conflicts in fertilizer-producing regions as well as trade actions taken by major fertilizer-producing countries.”
Yes, the conflict that Trump has created with Iran on top of the conflict Russia has created with Ukraine, both cutting off a lot of Natural Gas and the nitrogen made from NatGas are disrupting one major component of commercial fertilizer; but he cannot do anything to reduce that cost because it is already an established shortage due to the war. As for those “trade actions,” which affect phosphates extracted from mined rock, let me note that the “trade actions” Trump is removing are his own. Other countries do not charge our farmers tariffs on the fertilizer resources they have to sell and are normally more than happy to sell all they can. We charge our importers, and that cost gets placed on farmers.
Even if it were other countries taking action against the US, it would be their retaliatory response to the tariffs the US first imposed on US importers of the products those nations are shipping to the US. Adding tariffs to import prices reduces the extent to which American companies are willing or able to buy those resources. That is the whole point supposedly—to reduce imports from other nations to right the imbalances in trade. So goes the argument for tariffs. The result is shortages in the US, which I warned about a number of times last year as a trouble we’d see created by tariffs.
So, we’re getting a double-whammy from Trump’s tariff wars and his war in Iran, cutting off key ingredients—phosphates and nitrogen—that are essential major components in commercial fertilizers. His declaration continues:
For example, the United States’ largest foreign source of phosphate fertilizer has experienced supply chain disruption, placing additional pressure on the farm economy and the production of certain categories of domestic food. Persistent threats to the global fertilizer supply chain, which create rapid price increases and procurement challenges, require the United States to procure phosphate fertilizer from diversified foreign sources to mitigate the significant risk of harm to the agricultural food production of the United States.
“[…] Therefore, I, Donald J. Trump […] do hereby declare an emergency to exist with respect to the threats to the availability of sufficient supplies of fertilizers to meet expected agricultural demand.“
Yes, the supply-chain disruption, in the case of phosphates, is due to Trump’s own tariffs. In the case of nitrogen, the supply disruptions are primarily from the Trump-Israel Iran war. Trump doesn’t have any control right now over the nitrogen shortages caused by his war because Iran is still throttling traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and when it finally does fully open, it will take time to rebuild production—time we no longer have.
However, he can easily control the cost increases for phosphates because he caused them. By completely eliminating his tariffs on the mineral coming out of Morocco, as he has just done, he can reduce costs and eliminate the shortage issue in short order. So, one component of fertilizer will go down, reducing the price some. The other (nitrogen) will remain up, assuring the price stays a lot higher than it was before the war and the Trump tariffs.
Here is where this is a bellwether for the bursting of other bubbles I’ll talk about below: The President of the United States, by declaring an existing fertilizer crisis, is tacitly admitting to the genuine dangers of a full-on oil crisis. That is because the same thing is happening in crude oil as has been happening in natural gas. So, as I’ve been predicting, the same price increases and shortages will be coming for fuel that we have seen for fertilizer made from NatGas.
And, remember, just as the US produces more crude oil than it needs, it produces more natural gas than it needs. It does not, however, produce the kind of crude it needs for key distillates that go into some fuels, and, apparently, it does not have the full nitrogen extraction facilities it needs to meet all of its nitrogen requirements because we throw away a lot of natural gas. It has become used to buying some of those fertilizer products already refined and processed into granular fertilizer components in other nations.
This is the King of Chaos scrambling now to undo the damage his policies are creating without admitting directly that he is the cause, which is something we’ll never see; but he is admitting directly that trade-related shortages now do threaten an imminent food shortage for the United States if emergency actions are not immediately taken.
It is imperative to immediately facilitate importation of phosphate fertilizers from the Kingdom of Morocco to mitigate the significant risk to the agricultural food production of the United States, to safeguard the economic and national security of the United States, and to ensure a stable domestic food supply.
This is why I’ve given all my readers this simple recipe for stocking up on food by buying double the amount of foods with long shelf lives that they buy each week at the grocery store. Put half of that in storage in the basement, garage, a back closet, wherever it will be clear it is not your operational stock, but your overstock that you leave alone until needed (and because your kitchen won’t likely have enough room for significant overstock). The other half goes in your kitchen as normal operational supply.
When the supply in the kitchen cupboards runs out, go buy double the amount again, and put half of that in storage … again. Don’t give in to using the emergency overstock. Keep doing that until you have a good supply of overstock. Doing it this way automatically makes sure you are only adding stock of foods you regularly eat and in proportion to the amount you usually go through without having to figure it all out. It won’t save you in a famine, but it will get you through sporadic food shortages or buy you time to figure something out in the case of prolonged ones.
This method of mine helps minimize the cash flow and assures you are only stocking up on kinds of food you actually like to eat and know you will eat just in case the shortages don’t appear. So, worst case scenario, you saved on inflation down the road. You’re not spending extra money on special prepped foods, or buying things where you think, God forbid I ever have to eat all this dehydrated stuff.
At some point, you need to start rotating through your overstock before the use-by dates expire, so set it up to make rotating older stuff of any one kind of item to the front easy, such as columns running to the back for each single kind of item that you can reach over to stuff new stuff in behind or bins you can pull out that are loaded the same way with room for expanding the supply in each bin or dated bins. Whatever works easiest for you.
Do the same with non-food supplies that have a long life, such as toilet paper, buying, just doubling what you normally buy each time you buy it, in order to keep the amounts proportional to the way you actually go through the them.
I warned of shortages to develop here at The Daily Doom due to tariffs throughout the past year. Now we see it is an imminent enough food crisis to merit an “immediate” presidential elimination of phosphate tariffs with the nation that can supply a lot of phosphates. Expect to see more and more of these kinds problems with shortages emerging over time as both tariffs and the energy crisis rip like claws into the flesh of the US economy, which means into your flesh if you live in the US. However, the rest of the world is suffering the oil & gas crisis along with us as well as taking their own major economic hits from Trump’s tariffs or their retaliatory tariffs. So, what I write applies to everyone.
The chaos just keeps coming.