(Zero Hedge)—French government bonds sold off, and the CAC 40 fell Monday after a weekend of nationwide riots and chaos intensified concerns over political instability as the Macron government failed to restore order.
President Emmanuel Macron conveniently blamed high gas prices, while lefty corporate media ran cover and really tried to reinforce the narrative (again) that these rioters were merely youth-led protesters. CBS News got caught calling riots “scuffles” and subsequently deleted the X post.
And this.
In reality, France and much of Europe are being attacked from within by far-left groups, and this is really embarrassing, as globalist leaders in the failing bloc have allowed left-wing extremism to fester for years.
On top of the riots spurred by the far-left activist networks, a decade or more of unfettered mass migration brought in millions of migrants (watch how). Given this nation-killing cocktail, it comes as no surprise that corporate media would run an information campaign to cover up the parties responsible for the chaos because, quite frankly, these riots are downright embarrassing for globalists.
Let’s start with markets.
The premium investors demand to hold French 10-year debt over German bonds widened to 146 basis points, the highest in two weeks. The yield gap with Italy also reached a record, while the main equity index, the CAC 40, fell 1.3%, and the euro fell .5% to $1.1183 amid unrest spreading across the bloc.
Louis-Vincent Gave of Gavekal Research warned that France faces overlapping social, mass migration, energy, economic, and fiscal crises, all hitting at once like a massive freight train. He warned that the weekend’s developments offered little support for either a stronger euro or lower French borrowing costs.
“All this at a time when the French president is in office, but not in power. Nothing that occurred this weekend seems to point the way toward a higher euro, or lower French bond yields,” Gave said.
Macron is ending his term amid embarrassing social and economic crises, all colliding at once.
Riots across France today.
Looting, fires, vandalism and attacks against policemen and firefighters reported from cities across the country. pic.twitter.com/ZpVnuXTvC3
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 17, 2026
The president’s advisers likely gave him the script to go on national television late Sunday and blame the crisis on “fuel” prices, but this is far from the truth, as the rioters are far-left radicals mixed in with what appear to be migrants.
Corporate media first ran cover for an imploding France by blaming “students” angered by oversized classrooms and a lack of education funding for burning buses, buildings, and schools and looting high-end luxury stores. But that narrative has failed to stick as corporate media is no longer the gatekeepers of “truth.”
The unrest likely stems from ongoing discussions among French politicians over the proposed 2027 budget. The government’s proposed budget includes €43 billion ($48.2 billion) in measures to cut the deficit and keep the country from descending into a sovereign debt crisis. In other words, less funding for the welfare state.
“France’s credit-default swap curve is likely to flatten in the coming months as traders demand a bigger premium to underwrite idiosyncratic political risk ahead of the April presidential elections. …the French National Assembly began discussing next year’s budget last week without passing it yet. That adds one more layer of uncertainty for the country’s risk assets,” Bloomberg Strategists wrote in a note earlier today.
The problem is that spending cuts jeopardize the welfare state, as services are already deteriorating. The left and migrants who rely on handsome government handouts are likely furious that their easy way of life, leeching off taxpayers, could come to an end with a presidential election six months away and right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen rising in the polls and Polymarket odds. She is calling for austerity to fix the fiscal mess spurred by Macron’s globalist government.
“While the violent protests are not representative of the vast majority of the people, the developments over the weekend nevertheless underscore the delicate balancing act the government is facing between appeasing the people and the markets,” said Commerzbank AG strategist Erik Liem.
To sum up: Europe faces a combustible mix of far-left extremism, mounting pressures from more than a decade of mass migration, and welfare states buckling under higher borrowing costs. In France, those pressures are converging into a crisis of social unrest, fiscal crisis, and Macron ending his term in crisis.
As we warned on Sunday: France Enters “Point of No Return.” The question is whether Marine Le Pen can reverse that trajectory, or whether the forces driving France’s rapid demise are becoming too entrenched for any government to contain.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.