A Great Shutdown is underway
Fri 11:22 am +00:00, 30 Oct 2026
Source: https://moneycircus.substack.com/p/black-swan-and-perfect-storm
Black Swan & Perfect Storm
Multiple vectors of crisis incoming
Standfirst:
News comes at us fast, like the pitcher’s ball. We take them one by one, defence and deflection. We’re not looking to knock them out of the park. Survival is the game.
Crises in food and fertiliser, transport and fuel, jobs and AI, internet and cyber attacks, lack of chemicals bringing industries to a halt. What’s going on?
A Great Shutdown is underway and it was already a much bigger deal than Covid when I wrote about it in 2023. From energy prices that shutter industry, to brands that “go woke and go broke” — why burn it down unless that’s not where your wealth lies?
The ultimate tier 1 investors have their generational wealth in the ground and hard assets. They can shut down the consumer economy, it’s just a matter of timing.
The continuation of war despite the mounting loss of energy, the impact on food and essential inputs for industry, from pipes to metals to fertilisers, confirms my analysis.
The gas and oil spigot is being turned off.
I called out the Great Shutdown back in 2023 when it was not fit for polite conversation. Just as the Great Replacement is still not fit today.
At a certain time, late in the day, everyone will agree that they knew all along.
So let us examine this crisis.
The announcer over the speaker system tells us, during half time, that there will be a fly past.
We look up, and see black swans incoming.
Introduction:
- War and energy closures are fulfilling a plan to leave most energy in the ground
- The longer this goes on, the more it looks like shutdown by design
- How much are you prepared to absorb: food, fuel, cyber attack, digital intrusion
Related:
Not Enough Minerals For Green Energy – Putting the D in population (Sep 08, 2022)
The Never Normal is Forever – UK government aims to embed control through ‘new identities’ (Sep 07, 2021)
Europe’s Immaculate Deception – The hollow men & women of philanthropy’s vacuum (Sep 02, 2025)
Canada’s Unelected Prime Minister Takes Power – Globalism as a front for corporate might (Mar 14, 2025)
Follow The Consensus To Your Demise – First of a series on depopulation (Aug 09, 2023)
Housekeeping:
You can listen to this article on your phone using the Substack App. The online version of the story has all edits and corrections.
(2,800 words or about 12 minutes of your company)
Oct 29, 2026
A black swan event is a metaphor to describe something that no-one could even imagine — a happening that is unlikely because everyone assumes it to be impossible.
Only white swans existed in Europe. No-one had ever seen a black swan, so it was… impossible.
On the other side of the world, cygnus atratus was living happily in Australia.
There, black swans are not rare and they’re not random! Black swans migrate in a V-formation to minimise resistance and speed them to their destination; they are called a bevy of swans when they’re incoming by air, or a wedge when by water.
That’s what we’re seeing from the crises about to hit Western countries in particular. Not random events but black swans incoming.
Skip to the conclusion — the Great Shutdown — if you are short of time but be sure not to miss it. Please subscribe for free and consider becoming a paying supporter.
— Thank you, Mark
Cascading crises
We find, in no particular order, a growing number of crises affecting industry and society.
Job layoffs accelerate. Microsoft is offering redundancy to more than one quarter of its workforce, offering buyouts to 60,000 staff. Barclays bank is cutting five per cent of its staff, mainly in support functions. Groupon is going from human “digital native” to “AI native”, cutting a quarter of its jobs. It’s a broad trend, across many industries.
Internet insecurity is no longer a bug, it’s a feature. We see a global equivalent of Stuxnet (the virus that was used to break Iran’s nuclear centrifuges in 2010) and this time the target is whole-of-society. Cyber attacks and Internet outages shuttered banks last week. AI agents probed companies’ code. French supermarkets saw their fridge freezers hacked, temperatures cranked up to levels that spoiled food. If it can happen to their SMART fridges, then why not yours, or any device that’s hooked up, like the SMART meter that controls your electricity?
This was the scenario of the Obama-produced movie, “Leave the World Behind” (2023), in which a broad and rolling cyber attack exposes the fragility of its middle class characters.
Western newspapers are reporting on the vulnerability of Internet cables that pass under the Strait of Hormuz. Recall how the same politicians and media lamented Europe’s reliance on Russian gas shortly before the detonation of the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
Food prices rise. Don’t believe the official inflation numbers which are manipulated. Watch your shopping bill and the hidden, shrink-flation, of smaller packet sizes and cheaper ingredients.
U.S. wheat production is down 23 per cent on the year, to its lowest level since 1970. The reduction is caused partly by drought, El Niño and tired soils affecting yields, but also by a shift to higher-subsidised crops like corn and soy bean. The rising cost of fertiliser and diesel is another burden. Disruption to Ukraine exports through the Black Sea also pushed up grain prices.
The Quaker Oats factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, suffered an explosion and fire, five floors up in an area where the product moves, rather than where people work. No one was hurt but the building and its machinery were put out of action. It is the world’s largest oat-milling facility that processes over 2 million pounds of oats daily.
Fertiliser drought
The following graphic should give you the same jolt as five cups of coffee.
About 300 vessels carried fertiliser through the Strait of Hormuz in January (296 according to AXSMarine). In September and October, not a single one. The World Trade Organisation says this has removed one-third of the world’s seaborne fertiliser.
The Persian Gulf supplies 34 per cent of urea, the world’s most widely used nitrogen fertiliser. Prices initially doubled, according to the World Bank. Urea prices have since stabilised but phosphate fertilisers stayed high.
One reason is that phosphate fertiliser plants need sulphuric acid. The Persian Gulf supplies half of all seaborne sulphur. As costs surged above $1,000 a tonne, processors in India, Brazil and Egypt rationed production. Turkiye and China had limited their own exports of sulphur and urea.
Farmers are cutting orders, says the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Some are leaving fields fallow.
Small farmers are turning away from higher-value crops that take longer to generate income to those that generate faster cash flow, such as salad and vegetables.
Charl Van Zyl, of Meridian Macro, says rather than price, more telling is how much crop it takes to buy a tonne of fertiliser. Nitrogen-heavy urea is affordable, sulphur-produced phosphate is not. If you want a deep dive into the impact of the Persian Gulf crisis on commodities, I recommend his Substack post.
Stocks of fertiliser cushioned the impact on agriculture. In addition there is phosphorous and potash in the ground, but only a few countries have large deposits.
Morocco is a global power in phosphate rock, phosphoric acid, and phosphate fertilizers, holding roughly 70 per cent of the world’s total phosphate reserves.
Kazakhstan processes phosphate rock and, as a byproduct, dust that is rich in potassium and residual phosphorous.
Canada mines its own phosphate but it is also a potash (potassium) superpower. And China accounts for roughly 85 per cent of global yellow phosphorus production capacity.
Price at the pump
Pump prices hit the headlines when the U.S. and Israel struck Iran on February 28. About 20 per cent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
The average diesel price in the U.S. is $6.52 a gallon, and €2.13 per litre, equivalent to $9.0 per U.S. gallon. That’s up about two-thirds since the war started.
Tanker flows through the Strait of Hormuz are largely exaggerated. The truth can be found in the high cost of insurance and surging rental costs for tankers.
Oil tanker freight rates have surged tenfold, with shipping crude from the U.S. Gulf Coast to Asia costing up to $80 million per voyage.
Contrary to claims that the U.S. would benefit, the transport cost means Asian buyers are looking closer to home. Oil producers in the U.S. and Africa are having to offer steep discounts to offset the logistic cost.
Airlines and truckers face not just high prices, but shortage. These are the distillates produced from refining, and the “crack spread” has tripled from pre-war levels, driving up the price of kerosene.
Airlines cannot afford the cost of hedging future prices and are absorbing spot prices. That’s forced many carriers — including Lufthansa, KLM, SAS, United Airlines, and Air Canada — to cut scheduled flights.
Sulphur shortage
One of the key problems is the sulphur shortage from a decline in the refining of heavy crude, known as sour because of its sulphur content.
Sulphuric acid. Nasty stuff. But it is essential to separate copper and zinc from ore. Most silver is a byproduct of copper and zinc mining. The mining industry also needs sulphur to extract nickel from rock.
So the collapse in acid production in the Arabian Gulf will mean a shortage of silver, copper, zinc and nickel.
To pick another industry at random, there is now also a shortage of pipes of various kinds:
- Tube and steel pipes – The UAE cannot ship its production of oil well casing, tubing and coupling stock.
- European pipe production is declining because of high energy prices and costly compliance.
- PVC conduit and plumbing pipes – prices have jumped 60 per cent in a few months. Essential chemicals are in short supply.
Those happen to be essential to the electrical and other industries. Paradoxically the shortage of “fossil fuel” refining means we cannot have the renewable economy on the scale that we’ve been promised.
Now we come to the…
Great Shutdown
The phrase was used during Covid to describe the combined effect of lockdown and economic disruption.
I believe the shutdown began long before Covid and is much more broad based. There are three main vectors.
- Shutting down of traditional energy (coal, gas and oil) before renewable energy (wind and solar) is able to replace it. In many countries nuclear was also abandoned (as in Germany) or its expansion was slowed (as in the U.S. and many others) — thus continuous or baseload energy is increasingly swapped for intermittent energy dependent on the weather.
- The West shifted to a service sector as manufacturing was outsourced, resulting not just in deindustrialisation but degrowth.
See: Europe’s Immaculate Deception Continues – The Hollow Men & Women of Philanthropy’s Vacuum (Sep 02, 2025)
- The plan to leave up to 80 per cent of hydrocarbon energy in the ground coincides with the period when society is transitioned — according to UN Agenda 2030 and the Great Reset. How dramatic that transition will be, is for you to imagine.
Energy freeze
The decision to keep energy in the ground was only expressed in documents (see Carney, below). There has been no debate among the tribunes of the people. Now we are witnessing that freeze being implemented, as food and fuel production is shut down and blamed on the unforeseen trajectory of war.
Back in the 1970s (or perhaps earlier) the decision was made to deindustrialise the West and, in 1994, to outsource jobs through NAFTA. This accelerated with the premature closure of traditional energy sources. Then society was moved onto smartphones, while governments promoted electric-everything — most of which comes with kill switches, from electric vehicles to SMART meters.
See Canada’s Unelected PM Takes Power – Globalism as a front for corporate might, Part One (Mar 14, 2025)
You could pick different data points such as the post-World War Two decision to keep U.S. industry on a war footing, because it was more profitable, which necessitated the Cold War but resulted in decades of unexpected enrichment of the middle class.
The end began with the 1970s oil crises and the Yom Kippur war, which was blamed for price rises by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). This, in turn, laid the ground for the deal in which Saudi Arabia would invest its oil profits in U.S. Treasuries, leading to a massive U.S. borrowing spree that would crowd out productive investment. [1]
Lacking capacity
Not only are they shutting down traditional energy before renewables are ready to take up the slack, they are making impossible pledges, like banning all petrol-driven cars by 2030 and replacing internal combustion engines with battery-powered electric vehicles or EVs.
This is clearly impossible if you look at the data. Something has to give.
We are lacking the energy capacity to recharge all these batteries. More importantly, where are the minerals to build them? Australian geologist, Simon Michaux has exposed the huge gap between policy and reality.
Assuming all the world’s vehicles were replaced with electric, the existing known reserves contain only 5 per cent of the minerals needed to make the first set of batteries.
Hardly anyone was paying attention, and those few who did were denounced as “climate deniers.”
See Not Enough Minerals For Green Energy – Putting the D in population (Sep 08, 2022)
Great reset
King Charles launched the Reset three months into Covid, in June 2020. The Covid response led to massive demand destruction. The establishment media focused on supply chain disruption but in many cases the demand simply was not there. Government-mandated closure of businesses along with travel restrictions, resulted in job losses and uncertainty, causing people to sharply cut spending.
Remember during Covid when politicians and press said “there will be no going back to normal”? See here, here, here and here.
See my article, The Never Normal is Forever – UK government aims to embed control through ‘new identities’ (Sep 07, 2021)
The phrase “the new normal” was a strategy. Like the politicians chanting “Build Back Better’ they did not invent the phrase on the fly — you can only “build back” what you have destroyed.
Drill down
Canada’s premier Mark Carney is one of the main architects of the Great Shutdown.
A former governor of the central banks of Canada and England, he then served as the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, before being parachuted in as prime minister of Canada, which just happens to be the USA’s main trading partner.
Carney has said 80 per cent of total hydrocarbon energy reserves must stay in the ground — comprising roughly 75 per cent of coal, 50 per cent of gas, and 33 per cent of oil — to avoid severe climate change. He was citing a University College London study. [2]
These “stranded assets”, as he called fuel and the infrastructure to extract and process hydrocarbons, must be treated as devalued or obsolete until humanity has completed its transition.
Progressive journal, The Nation, admitted that the press largely ignored Carney’s Net Zero views, which “carry radical political and economic implications.”
Third vector
If Covid was largely demand destruction, now we have massive supply disruption caused by the war on Iran and, to a lesser degree, the war with Russia.
We are seeing, by accident or design, the implementation of that plan to leave coal, gas and oil in the ground, through carbon taxes but also through war.
What is gained by shutting down the economy? When are they going to open it up again? As David Dubyne told Mike Adams:
“Is green energy a stop-gap measure for a few people to have electricity while this whole thing folds in on itself, and then new energy is released later? It seems that fossil fuel is being purposely taken off line, one slow turn every single day or week.”
At another point in the interview, Dubyne, who compresses many ideas into few words, says:
“We were over four billion people in 1974-5. Isn’t it interesting that Nixon took us off the gold standard and was able to expand the money supply during those exact same years? I think those two were running in tandem for a reason. Now this is about to contract once again.” [3]
A “perfect storm” may catch you by surprise; others may have seen it coming.
Consensus to demise
From Follow The Consensus To Your Demise – First of a series on depopulation (Aug 09, 2023):
The Great Shutdown,and strategies like “go Woke, go broke”, are evidence that the corporations are a primarily a means of propagation and control. [4]
People ask, “why would the owners damage their own brands?”
Because that is not where their wealth lies. Their wealth is amassed in the ground, and they can close factories and farms, they can temporarily close down “fossil fuels” and experiment with renewable energy, even if the majority of the population goes cold and hungry.
The über-wealthy could even dispense with mass consumption and billions of consumers — in fact, that is what King Charles and his minion Klaus Schwab revealed when they launched The Great Reset, aka The Great Shutdown.
They seek a new society, with new social orders, and it will be based on a very different way of allocating energy, food and resources. Stuff will no longer just “be there” to clothe or feed billions of people.
The cotton will not be picked, the apple will remain unplucked.
The cloth will be synthetic; the apple produced in a lab, from a self-destructing seed, or seedless, so there will be nothing to plant.
This encapsulates the business rationale behind the owner-investors’ craze for seizing patents, ruling whole areas of research off-limits, modelling and patenting DNA of flora and fauna, plant and paw, including humans.
It is the monetisation and tokenisation of life.
Black Swan & Perfect Storm
After coming up with the headline, I did my customary double check and found that a band, Boris Rybak And Brothers In Arms, have a song with that title. Hat tip to them for coming up with it first. I hope you like it.
