Europe’s struggles with its food and fuel supplies began after most nations on the continent imposed economic sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. This threatened the flow of already-critical commodities in Europe and threatened to collapse already-struggling global supply chains.
As a result, the prices of everything from oil to wheat have soared, leading to multi-decade high inflation rates. Supplies of these essential products have also dwindled after exports from Russia were completely strangled.
Sunflower oil, wheat, dairy and gas are being rationed
In Spain, the country started experiencing sporadic shortages of different products like eggs, milk and other dairy products almost immediately following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. In early March, major supermarkets like Mercadona and Makro began rationing sunflower oil.
Spain’s left-wing government even went further and gave stores the option to temporarily impose limits on the number of certain products customers purchase.
In Greece, at least four national supermarket chains have started rationing food products like flour and sunflower oil due to critically low supplies caused by the crippled supply chains coming out of Russia and Ukraine.
The supermarkets claim the current rationing is only a preventive measure that will be rolled back once Greece’s supplies of flour and sunflower oil stabilize. Around 30 percent of Greece’s wheat imports come from Russia and Ukraine.
“The reason for the cap on these products is only precautionary, as our customers are concerned about the war in Ukraine,” said one official from supermarket chain Alfa-Beta Vassilopoulos. “We want to ensure we will be able to serve our customers’ needs in the future too.”
“Flour and sunflower oil are the two products which, apart from energy, the war has affected more than anything else,” said Greek Minister for Development and Investment Adonis Georgiadis. “There are already shortages throughout Europe.”
In Germany, the nation triggered the first part of a three-stage emergency plan to conserve the country’s natural gas supply. This move came after Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that Germany pay for Russian gas in rubles in an attempt to twist Western sanctions against Russia.
The first stage of the emergency plan will lead to “targeted” shutdowns of the flow of natural gas to “specified individual large consumers.”
German Vice-Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck explained that the current rationing plan is a preventive measure implemented to make sure the country doesn’t experience a critical shortage.
Germany is also attempting to reduce or outright eliminate its dependence on Russian gas. Before the war, 55 percent of Germany’s natural gas came from Russia. Now, that number has been reduced to 40 percent with the help of natural gas flows from the Netherlands, France and Belgium.
Food and fuel rationing a consequence of globalism
“The collapse is on … and no signs of slowing down anytime soon,” said Harrison Smith of InfoWars. “In fact, all evidence points to the contrary. It points to those in charge and with the ability to prevent the downside doing everything they can to exacerbate and perpetuate the total collapse of the world economy, particularly in Western countries.” (Related: Gas rationing, food vouchers and hunger are now being normalized for the war phase of the plandemic.)
Smith, the host of “American Journal” on InfoWars, noted that if the global economy wasn’t so dependent on imports from other nations, the war in Ukraine would not have caused such a massive problem for the food and fuel supplies of other nations.
“All of this is really just predicated on globalism. It wouldn’t really be that big of an issue if we didn’t get our toilet paper from China,” he said. “If some ship running aground in the Suez Canal, quite literally on the polar opposite side of the world, somehow makes it so that I can’t buy toilet paper … that’s a problem, and it’s a problem in our world structure.”
Learn more about the state of the global economy and the rationing of food and fuel around the world by reading the latest articles at MarketCrash.news.
Watch this episode of “American Journal” on InfoWars as host Harrison Smith talks about the start of food and fuel rationing in Europe.
Gregg is joined by Michael O’Neill, assistant general counsel at Landmark Legal Foundation
A true leader has the courage and humility to admit their own mistakes. A coward blames others.
Since the first day of his presidency, Joe Biden has waged all-out war on our domestic energy industry, crippling our nation’s ability to provide the needed resources to sustain our own economy. It was a grievous mistake that has caused prices to soar and left consumers struggling financially.
Americans are smart. They know that Biden is responsible. 70 percent disapprove of his handling of inflation and gas prices, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll. It is a damning indictment of Biden’s policies, if not his incompetence.
Instead of having the fortitude to admit that his misguided green agenda badly damaged the U.S. economy, Biden blames Putin.And our nation’s oil companies. And OPEC. And bankers on Wall Street. And transportation companies. And COVID. And the kid who kicked the cat.
Never once has Biden looked in the mirror for a moment of self-reflection. He is incapable of recognizing that he was wrong in his decision to reverse our nation’s energy independence.
Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
With stubborn arrogance, Biden ignored all the warnings by economists and energy experts who rang the alarm over his debilitating energy policies.
They correctly predicted that America would be left vulnerable to an unstable global marketplace…resulting in an inflationary spiral that would push us to the precipice of recession.
But Joe refused to listen. Now, he blames everyone but himself. In refusing to accept responsibility as a true leader would, Biden is a profile in cowardice.
When Biden took office a little more than a year ago,the U.S. was energy independent and a net exporter of oil. With the stroke of a pen just hours after his inauguration, our new president put an end to it.
Biden signed the following Executive Order: “The Secretary of the Interior shall pause new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or in offshore waters.” Drilling and production on hundreds of thousands of rich oil and gas fields came to a screeching halt.
Biden also shut down the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring over 800,000 barrels of oil to market every single day. He ordered other pipelines capped.
He then targeted oil and gas companies with punitive regulations that made it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a consistent flow of energy to support our bustling economy. Making matters worse, Biden directed the EPA to raise the costs on power plants which began to reduce their output as a direct result.
Biden has tried to regulate oil and gas companies out of business. All on his own, he engineered an energy deficit in America. The U.S. was forced to turn elsewhere for its needs —Saudi Arabia, Russia, Canada, and Mexico. Of course, importing petroleum added its own exorbitant expense that was passed on to the consumer.
Fast forward one year and America is in the death grip of an energy and inflation crisis. Gasoline prices at the pumps are at record highs. That has driven up the price for other goods such as food, clothing and other manufactured products that are influenced by increased fuel costs. Overall inflation has skyrocketed…depressing economic growth.
Suffice it to say that Biden’s approach to energy has been an economic disaster for Americans. He has suffocated economic productivity in America and steered us into a financial abyss that will be exceedingly difficult to survive.
But Biden insists he’s not to blame. “Look…It’s simply not true that my administration or my policies are holding back energy production,” he vented.
Biden isn’t the only one who’s blatantly lying about what he did.
Joe is in a chronic state of denial. He keeps claiming that Putin is the boogeyman to blame.
His White House flacks say that the current inflationary crisis proves that Joe’s green agenda is working. That’s right. Press Secretary Jen Psaki actually said that. Not to be outdone, the president’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, dismissed it as “a high-class problem.”
Forget that low-income and middle-class Americans are the hardest hit. They can now scarcely afford the gasoline that gets them to work so they can put food on the family table and keep a roof over their heads. The Biden administration is about as tone-deaf as they come.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Vice President Kamala Harris professed they had the answer for what ails America. They held a splashy news conference to announce an expensive plan to develop electric public buses.But in the meantime, they urged everyone to give up their cars and trucks in favor of expensive EVs. Harris asked her audience to“imagine a future” with only electric vehicles. “That’s why we are here today —because we have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible actually happen,” she waxed in her dreamy state.
Well, Kamala…imagine this: more than 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They can barely cobble together the cash to fill up their gas tanks. They can’t possibly afford to buy a pricey electric vehicle.
The average transaction price for an EV is roughly $60,000, according to the most recent Kelly Blue Book data. Yes, there are a few cheaper ones…but they’re small, hard to come by, and cannot accommodate a large family. But even those cars are well out of the price range for most Americans who just don’t have the money to fork over.
Harris and Buttigieg don’t know any of that because they live a life of privilege courtesy of taxpayers. Their transportation is free. They travel in style and luxury. So does Joe Biden. They have no clue what it’s like to hold down a real job and make ends meet when the monthly bills come due.
This invites another important question: when you plug in your EV (assuming you can afford one), where do you think that electricity comes from? It comes from the nation’s power grid,much of which is derived from the very fossil fuels that the Biden administration is waging war against.
Biden, Harris and so many other climate activists seem to think that they can wave a magic wand or flip a switch and poof! —we can suddenly transition to an environmentally sustainable economy with nothing but renewable green energy.
Here’s a reality check. It doesn’t exist. We don’t have the capacity, infrastructure, and technology to accomplish it. We don’t have the ability to produce, capture, and transport enough green energy to supply even a quarter of the country. I wish we did, but we don’t. And we won’t have it for at least another generation, if not longer.
We have made steady progress in scientific achievements that have advanced wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. But they still amount to only 20 percent of our nation’s electricity. And that’s the maximum output that our systems can process. In the meantime, demands for energy continue to grow as our society continues to develop.
None of this is a remedy for the economic catastrophe that the U.S. is facing right now. Biden created it with his ill-conceived assault on domestic energy.
His policies hiked the cost of oil and gasto intentionally make fossil fuels unaffordable without a viable replacement for them.His regulations drove up the expense of production while reducing the supply just as consumption went up. Inevitably, prices skyrocketed. Hardworking Americans are now suffering because of it.
But Joe is in a chronic state of denial. He keeps claiming that Putin is the boogeyman to blame.
Forget that gasoline prices and inflation across America reachednear record levels longbefore Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They’ve been on the rise during the past six months. Inflation is close to 8 percent —a new 40 year high for the third month in a row.This obviously predates Putin’s war.
Just days ago, at a conference of Democrats, both Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to convince members of their own party that they’re not to blame.
Biden: “I’m sick of this stuff…because the American people think the reason there’s inflation is because the government is spending more money. Simply not true.”
Pelosi: “It’s Putin’s gas hike, that’s his gas hike, there’s so much of this increase in this gas tax…uh… gas price… started…uh, weeks leading up to what happened there.”
Biden: “Make no mistake, inflation is largely the fault of Putin. I love, you know, Republicans saying it’s Biden’s gas pipeline…Biden said he’s going to stop the Keystone Pipeline…and I did!”
It’s not just Biden’s deranged energy policy that is wreaking havoc. Hisprofligate spending compounded the crisis. Like drunken sailors on payday, he and Pelosi pumped trillions of dollars into the U.S. economy. It’s impossible to saturate the marketplace with that much currency without causing prices to go up. It is basic Economics 101.
Yet, Pelosistood before microphones and turned the fundamentals of economics on its head by stating,“Government spending is doing the exact reverse —reducing the government debt. It is not inflationary.”
Pelosi’s tortured logic was an embarrassing face-plant. Our national debt, which stands at $30 trillion is going up, not down. And even Biden conceded in a previous speech in November that his $2 trillion American Rescue Plan caused prices to go up. It was an uncommon moment of clarity. But now he’s changed his tune…because politicians are nothing if not duplicitous.
Voters understand economics far better than Biden and Pelosi. The polling data shows that Americans are deeply unhappy that the president and his party have driven energy prices and inflation off the proverbial cliff. They know that this is Biden’s inflation. Yet he refuses to own it.
Nor are they buying his vacuous excuses. You remember them. First, he claimed that inflation was “transitory.” Thenit was merely a supply chain snafu. Thenthe White House said it was “actually a good sign.” When that didn’t sell, it was all Putin’s fault.
All the while, Biden keeps pretending that economy is in great shape, and we should double-down on his green energy agenda to eliminate all fossil fuels now. If that sounds like a sane strategy, you should get your head examined.
What happens when cars run out of gas and the lights go out? What happens when people can no longer heat their homes? Will Joe keep scapegoating and gaslighting? You can bet on it.
When he was sworn into office, Joe vowed that he would exhibit the courage and humility that true leadership demands. He declared, “I promise you, I’m going to take responsibility. When I make a mistake, I’ll admit it.” He hasn’t done it, and he won’t do it.
Instead, Biden has embraced the tactics of a coward…who blames others for his own mistakes.
On its Instagram account, McDonald’s Russia doesn’t peddle celebrity menu collaborations, clever cultural memes or corporate-branded swag, as does its counterpart in the United States. Mickey D’s in Russia takes a different approach to cultivating customer relationships: It gives them video walking tours of Moscow and St. Petersburg, inviting locals to better appreciate the architecture of the cities they call home. The tour guide will, with his preferred McCafe drink in hand, traverse the snow-
— Read on finance.yahoo.com/news/mcdonalds-didnt-just-close-850-200542820.html
MOSCOW, RUSSIA – 2022/03/09: The logo of the McDonald’s fast food chain seen on the roof of the restaurant. (Photo by Alexander Sayganov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) (SOPA Images via Getty Images)
On its Instagram account, McDonald’s Russia doesn’t peddle celebrity menu collaborations, clever cultural memes or corporate-branded swag, as does its counterpart in the United States. Mickey D’s in Russia takes a different approach to cultivating customer relationships: It gives them video walking tours of Moscow and St. Petersburg, inviting locals to better appreciate the architecture of the cities they call home.
The tour guide will, with his preferred McCafe drink in hand, traverse the snow-covered streets of the city to point out, say, the St. Petersburg Mutual Credit Society building, the first building specifically constructed in Russia for a commercial bank. “The building resembles the palace buildings of the Renaissance era,” according to a translation of the video post.
The relationship McDonald’s has with its Russian customers is unusual: It is part hustler, part history professor, part corporate benefactor, part Stuart Smalley. “Let’s write to each other sincere wishes and congratulations for the coming year in the comments and go into 2022 with a great mood,” reads a translated Instagram post from Dec. 30.
Nearly two weeks after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, and after activists and investors pressed the company, McDonald’s announced Tuesday that it would temporarily close 850 restaurants in Russia. In the announcement, Chris Kempczinski, chief executive of McDonald’s, said, “Our values mean we cannot ignore the needless human suffering unfolding in Ukraine.” He also acknowledged the tight relationship that the chain has developed with Russians in the 32 years since the Golden Arches opened its first restaurant in 1990, when the country was still under Soviet control.
“In Russia, we employ 62,000 people who have poured their heart and soul into our McDonald’s brand to serve their communities,” Kempczinski said in an email to employees and franchisees. “We work with hundreds of local, Russian suppliers and partners who produce the food for our menu and support our brand. And we serve millions of Russian customers each day who count on McDonald’s.
Fears of a recession and a 1970s-style stagflation economy continue to grip Wall Street and investors this week, as multiple reports show that recession signals have intensified. With oil and commodity prices surging, Reuters reports that investors are “recalibrating their portfolios for an expected period of high inflation and weaker growth.”
While Wall Street Fears Stagflation, Analyst Believes ‘Global Markets Will Collapse’ This Year
This week there’s been a slew of headlines indicating that fears of a 1970s-style stagflationeconomy have risen and economic fallout is coming soon. Three days ago, Reuters’ author David Randall noted that U.S. investors are scared of a hawkish central bank, oil prices surging, and the current conflict in Ukraine. Randall spoke with Nuveen’s chief investment officer of global fixed income, Anders Persson, and the analyst noted stagflation isn’t here just yet, but it is getting near that point.
“Our base case is still not 1970s stagflation, but we’re getting closer to that ZIP code,” Persson said.
On Saturday, Bitcoin.com News reported on the skyrocketing energy stocks, precious metals, and global commodities breaking market records. The same day, the popular Twitter account Pentoshi tweeted about a pending “greater depression.” At the time of writing, the tweet was retweeted 69 times and has close to a thousand likes. Pentoshi told his 523,500 Twitter followers:
The most exciting thing this year. Will be global markets collapsing. Any market that trades above 0 will be too high. They will call this: ‘The greater depression’ which will be 10x worse than the Great Depression.
US Treasury Yield Curve Highlights ‘Recession Concerns Showing up More Prominently’
The following day, Reuters’ author Davide Barbuscia detailed that “recession concerns are showing up more prominently in the U.S. Treasury yield curve.” Data from Barbuscia’s report stresses that the “closely watched gap between yields on two- and 10-year notes stood at its narrowest since March 2020.”
Two- and 10-year U.S. Treasury Yield Curve Rates via Nasdaq on March 6, 2022.
Numerous financial publications are highlighting how rising oil and commodity prices are typically associated with a pending recession. Furthermore, recent filings indicate that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway obtained a $5 billion stake in Occidental Petroleum. Berkshire Hathaway has also doubled the firm’s exposure to Chevron as well.
The Biden administration will waive sanctions on the corporate entity and CEO overseeing the construction of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline into Germany, according to two sources briefed on the decision.
Why it matters: The decision indicates the Biden administration is not willing to compromise its relationship with Germany over this pipeline, and it underscores the difficulties President Biden faces in matching actions to rhetoric on a tougher approach to Russia.
Driving the news: The State Department will imminently send its mandatory 90-day report to Congress listing entities involved in Nord Stream 2 that deserve sanctions. Sources familiar with the drafting of the report tell Axios the State Department plans to call for sanctions against a handful of Russian ships.
The State Department will also acknowledge that the corporate entity in charge of the project (Nord Stream 2 AG) and its CEO (Putin crony and former East German intelligence officer Matthias Warnig) are engaged in sanctionable activities.
However, the State Department will waive the applications of those sanctions, citing U.S. national interests.
This planned move seems at odds with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement, made during his confirmation hearing: “I am determined to do whatever we can to prevent that completion” of Nord Stream 2.
Between the lines: This planned move also sets up a bizarre situation in which the Biden administration will be sanctioning ships involved in the building of Nord Stream 2 but refusing to sanction the actual company in charge of the project.
Sources close to the situation say that top Biden officials have determined that the only way to potentially stop the project — which is 95% complete — is to sanction the German end users of the gas.
And the Biden administration is not willing to rupture its relationship with Germany over Nord Stream 2.
The big picture: As Axios has previously reported, the completion of Nord Stream 2 would be a huge geopolitical win for Putin and give him substantial new leverage in Europe.
Russian gas currently has to pass through Ukraine on its way to Europe. Bypassing Ukraine with a direct pipeline to Germany is an opportunity for Russia to advance its goal of isolating its former client state, now a fledgling democracy, from Western Europe.
Russia has a long track record of cutting critical supplies to its neighbors during disputes, including cutting off gas to Ukraine.
The pipeline could be finished by the summer without a major intervention to stop it.
A State Department spokesperson told Axios the Biden administration had made clear that companies participating in Nord Stream 2 could face sanctions and would “continue to underscore U.S. strong, bipartisan opposition to this Russian malign influence project.”
“The Biden administration has been clear that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a Russian geopolitical project that threatens European energy security and that of Ukraine and eastern flank NATO allies and partners,” the spokesperson said.
The State Department spokesperson would not confirm the waivers or any details about the imminent report.
Administration sources contend any waivers applied to sanctions could be removed at any time.
They also argue the act of sanctioning and then waiving an entity establishes leverage over it, given the company would know that at any moment, the U.S. could reinstate the sanction.
They also add that the Biden administration’s goal remains to see that the pipeline doesn’t go into use.
The Trailblazing Patriot 