Join Us at the 2023 World Economic Conference in Orlando, Florida!

? Dates: November 17, 18, and 19 ? Location: Orlando, Florida, USA (or tune in from home with our virtual ticket options)

Are you ready to unlock the future of economics and finance? Prepare for an unforgettable World Economic Conference experience in sunny Orlando, Florida! This premier event is your gateway to insights, networking, and valuable resources that will supercharge your understanding of the global economy.

?️ What’s Included for In-Person Attendees:

1. Event Admission: Enjoy reserved seating assigned based on the order of ticket sales, ensuring you have a prime view of every presentation.
2. Presentation Slides: Gain access to the presentation slides from all speakers, allowing you to delve deeper into the topics discussed.
3. Video Recording: Can’t make it to a session? No worries! You’ll receive access to video recordings of all conference presentations, so you can catch up at your convenience.
4. WEC Event App: Connect with the conference on a whole new level. Access presentation slides, bonus reports, recordings, and more via the official WEC Event App.
5. Bonus Conference Materials: Get a package of bonus conference-related materials, including exclusive bonus reports and videos (as provided by Martin Armstrong).
6. Morning Information Sessions: Don’t miss out on important morning information sessions, screened on-site in the meeting room on Saturday and Sunday.
7. Networking Opportunities: Exclusive access to the Event App Networking Feature allows you to connect with fellow attendees, both in-person and virtual, fostering valuable professional relationships.
8. Culinary Delights: Savor delicious breakfast and lunch on Saturday and Sunday, prepared to keep you energized throughout the day.
9. Cocktail Reception: Kick off the conference in style at our Friday evening cocktail reception. Meet and mingle with fellow attendees while enjoying refreshing drinks.
10. Swag Bag: As a token of our appreciation, each in-person attendee will receive a swag bag filled with goodies, including an Armstrong Economics notebook, pen, and an event collector’s mug!

Unable to travel? We also have two different ticket options for those wishing to attend virtually! 

Don’t miss this opportunity to be part of a global gathering of economic and financial minds. Secure your spot at the World Economic Conference in Orlando, Florida, and gain the knowledge, connections, and resources you need to thrive in the world of finance and economics.

Space is limited, so act now and reserve your seat! Visit our Events page to register and join us in sunny Orlando this November.

Now available at all major retailers!

The eBook will be available shortly.

The second edition of “The Plot to Seize Russia – The Untold History” is now available for purchase in paperback and hardcover on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The ebook will be available shortly.

Book description:

“Take care of Russia,” Boris Yeltsin said as he departed his presidency in August 1999. These words were directed at current Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin specifically picked Putin as his predecessor to prevent the takeover of Russia.

So, who was Yeltsin warning against? Newly declassified documents from the Clinton Administration prove that there was a plot to rig the Russian election of 2000. These never-before-seen documents confirm numerous attempts to implement pro-Western policies using the Russian oligarchy headed by Boris Berezovsky.

On the other side were the communists who desired a return to the glory days of the Soviet Union. As one of the largest international hedge fund managers, author Martin Armstrong found himself in the middle of perhaps the greatest espionage, or attempt at a regime change for Russia, in modern history.

The Plot to Seize Russia pulls back the curtain to expose the most extraordinary attempt to seize power in modern history, but with the pen rather than armies. These declassified documents reveal a plot that has altered our thinking about the relations between the United States and Russia. The thirst for power comes seething through every line of these papers that alter our perception of reality, change the course of history, and now threaten us with World War III.

The Board of Peace was established in November 2025 to champion the Gaza-Israel ceasefire. Donald Trump will act as the first chairman and has begun inviting nations to join, including Russia. The headlines are reacting as if this is some radical, unprecedented concept.

I have said repeatedly that the real objective for decades has never been “defense.” It has been control. NATO was transformed from a Cold War alliance into a political weapon, and once you turn something into an instrument of power, you can no longer negotiate honestly because your entire structure depends upon having an enemy. That is why every peace proposal gets attacked by the very people who claim they want peace. Their careers, budgets, and political relevance depend on conflict.

Here is what the press will not tell you. Russia was asked to join NATO in the 1990s. I have seen the declassified documents from the Clinton Administration and provided them in my book, The Plot to Seize Russia. Russia was offered the chance to join NATO. That was viewed internally as a surrender to the United States, and it fueled political backlash inside Russia. Yeltsin standing on the tank was not some Hollywood moment. It was the turning point where Russia’s internal struggle over its future collided with how the West was positioning itself behind the scenes.

The West had a window where it could have ended the Cold War properly. Instead, it pivoted into expansion, not because it was “necessary,” but because it was profitable and politically useful. They wanted a unipolar world. They wanted Russia down permanently. They wanted Europe locked into dependence. And now they stand there shocked that Russia will not play the role of obedient subordinate.

The Board of Peace is a public relations attempt to manage a crisis that has spiraled beyond anyone’s control. The bankers, the politicians, and the bureaucrats are all trapped. Europe is collapsing economically, and war has become the only policy tool they have left to distract the population from the failure of their fiscal mismanagement, their censorship, their energy suicide, and their endless taxation.

Trump’s instinct here is not wrong: peace comes from aligning interests, not moral posturing. If you want to stop wars, you have to remove the incentive structure that rewards war. Bringing Russia into a broader security framework is not a “gift” to Russia. It is a way to remove the excuse for escalation. It is what should have happened decades ago. But the Neocons cannot allow that because the moment there is peace, the public starts asking where all the money went, why their standard of living is falling, and why government debt has exploded to levels that cannot be sustained.

Europe claims Russia is the threat, yet they have been pushing NATO to Russia’s border for decades while pretending it was “defensive.” If Russia had placed a military alliance on the US border, Washington would have responded the same way. This is not complicated. It is human nature and geopolitics.

The world is moving into a Sovereign Debt Crisis. That is the real backdrop to all of this. Governments are desperate because they cannot fund themselves honestly anymore. They will use war to justify capital controls. They will use war to justify surveillance. They will use war to justify anything. That is why the trend is becoming far more hostile globally. This is not about one man, one country, or one election. It is the cycle of government itself. Confidence rises and falls, and when confidence collapses, governments always reach for force.

If Trump is serious about a new peace structure, it will not be popular among the establishment because it threatens the entire war machine. And if Russia joining NATO is even discussed, it will expose the biggest lie of the last 30 years — that this was ever about defense rather than domination. They had the chance in the 1990s. They rejected real peace then, because peace did not serve their agenda.

Trump is requesting that Board of Peace member states pay $1 billion for permanent membership. This kind of blunt, transactional policy is misread by those who believe peace should come without a price tag, but it exposes the core hypocrisy that has infected NATO and the entire post-war alliance structure.

For decades, Europe has behaved as if the United States is some endless ATM that exists to underwrite its defense, its bureaucracy, and its political fantasies. They lecture the world about morality, human rights, and “shared values,” while simultaneously refusing to pay their own bills. NATO has become the perfect example. The United States supplies the overwhelming share of the money, the hardware, the logistics, and the risk, while Europe holds press conferences and tells America what it “must” do. That is not an alliance.

The press will portray this $1 billion idea as extortion. There is no such thing as collective security without collective contribution. If a country wants a seat at the table permanently, wants access to intelligence, protection, diplomacy, crisis response, and the prestige of being “in the club,” then they should have skin in the game. Otherwise, what you get is what we have now where countries demand war because they know someone else will pay for it.

Members can participate for three-year stints without the lump sum, but a lifetime membership is bought at a fixed price. That is far more honest than the current arrangement, where membership becomes a permanent entitlement, and the bill gets dumped on the United States through political pressure. At least this is transparent. Pay for permanence or rotate in and out.

The real issue here is that NATO was never designed to be a welfare system. It was created in a very different era, and like every bureaucracy, it evolved into something that exists for its own survival. Once an institution has payrolls, pensions, contractors, and political status, it will find reasons to continue forever. That is why NATO has expanded rather than dissolved after the Cold War. That is why there is always a new “existential threat.” If there is no enemy, there is no justification for the budget.

Trump treats alliances like contracts. Contracts require terms, enforcement, and payment. The Europeans want the benefits of an American security, but they do not want the obligations. That is why they always scream “America First” as if it is some crime to defend your own national interest.

But Europe cannot pay. That is the underlying reason for the entire crisis. They are sinking under socialism, overregulation, and endless taxation. Their energy policy has been economic suicide. Their debt is rising while their economies stagnate. Their demographic trend is collapsing. They have built a model where productive people are punished to subsidize bureaucracies and political promises that can never be honored. And the establishment now seeks war because it distracts the people, justifies emergency powers, and provides an excuse for confiscation.

The media will claim this makes diplomacy exclusive or pay-to-play. But diplomacy is already pay-to-play. It always has been. The difference is that now the payment is explicit rather than hidden through backdoor pressure, debt issuance, and American taxpayers financing Europe’s defense while Europe spends money on welfare programs and lectures America about climate taxes. When an alliance becomes a one-way street, it will not last. Trump is simply forcing the accounting that everyone else has refused to do.

Around 10% of all autos sold in Poland were manufactured in China, a sharp 427% annual increase. Governments have been leery of Chinese autos, fearing their ability to undercut the European market, but now a new concern has arisen—military security.

Chief of the General Staff General Wiesław announced a coming ban on all Chinese-manufactured cars in military facilities and units. “In 2025, the Military Counterintelligence Service issued guidelines on how to protect military facilities in connection with threats arising from the use of various devices manufactured in China,” the ministry stated.

Poland is not the first nation to ban Chinese-made vehicles from military bases. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) refuse to permit Chinese autos form entering military bases. Owners must park outside the perimeter as the Chinese government may be using cameras and sensors to acquire sensitive data. The IDF has already recalled 700 Chinese-made EVs, citing a “real concern of sensitive information leakage.”

The UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) has also banned certain Chinese vehicles from “sensitive military bases” and other sites that could be vulnerable to espionage. The MoD went as far as asking personnel to monitor their private discussions while driving in Chinese cars, and to assume that the Chinese government has the ability to monitor them at all times.

China has banned Tesla vehicles from entering their military bases and housing complexes for the same reason. All modern vehicles have advanced cameras, GPD, microphones, and the ability to log data. We cannot ensure we are in privacy even when we are inside our personal vehicles. The bigger concern becomes whether governments will begin rejecting foreign vehicles entirely.

QUESTION: Marty; Do you intend to endorse anyone for the midterm elections?

ER

ANSWER: No. The Neocons have their fangs very deep into Congress. I cannot in good conscience endorse anyone. Even if the actual candidate may not be on board with the Neocons, they install plants who give bad advice to support the Neocons, even when the candidate is unaware that they are being manipulated. I have tried my best, but it just is not good enough.

Europe’s Delusion: The Sixth March to Moscow
The cycle of history reveals a pattern so consistent it borders on the absurd: Europe, clinging to memories of empires that no longer exist, repeatedly attempts to reassert dominance through the conquest or subjugation of Russia. We are now witnessing what may be the sixth iteration of this fatal attraction, and like all previous attempts, it is destined to fail—not because of Russian military superiority, but because Europe fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power in the 21st century and refuses to accept its own diminished position in the global order.

The cycle is clear. Europe’s time as a dominant force in world affairs ended 80 years ago. The sixth invasion of Russia is merely the final proof that Europe’s political elite class never accepted this reality. By the time the current crisis resolves, that acceptance will no longer be optional. The world is moving on, and Europe is being left behind—frozen in the Russian winter of its own making, one final time.

The idea that the Eurozone’s larger GDP would automatically make the euro defeat the dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency was a popular hypothesis in the early years of the euro (late 1990s/early 2000s), but it has proven to be an oversimplification. This has always been about rising to the top of the world once again living in the glow of past memories of greatness.

The newspaper that famously claimed the “Pound’s days are numbered” and would decline because the UK was not joining the euro was The Independent. On June 5, 2000, The Independent ran a front-page headline stating “Pound’s days are numbered”, with the article arguing that the pound was doomed to fall sharply in value if Britain stayed out of the euro. This came during a period of intense debate in the UK about whether to adopt the single European currency.

The problem always stems from the failure to understand what is the backbone of a reserve currency that the Eurozone lacks. In times of global crisis, investors still overwhelmingly flock to U.S. dollar assets. The capitalization of just the NYSE is greater than all of European exchanged combined. Political & Military Power has always been key from ancient dats of Athens, Alexander the Great, to Rome and even Venice during the Middle Ages. The dollar’s role is underpinned by U.S. geopolitical influence and security alliances, which the EU does not match as a unified entity.

The prediction, however, turned out to be incorrect in the medium term. Instead of declining, the pound actually strengthened significantly against the euro for much of the following decade, reaching a peak in the mid-2000s. The journalists and economists who confidently declared the “pound’s days are numbered” in 2000 were catastrophically wrong. Yet most faced no professional consequences for such spectacular predictive failure—they simply moved on to the next confident prediction.

This is why I have consistently argued: ignore the consensus, follow the cycle, and question anyone who claims certainty about complex systems reduced to a single explanation. The euro prediction debacle is a textbook case of how political ideology, groupthink, and institutional bias can produce wildly inaccurate forecasts that are presented as inevitable economic truth.

This headline is often cited as a classic example of media misjudgment on major economic and political issues. A significant strand of argument in parts of the London press did claim that adopting the euro was a French-led project designed to challenge, and ultimately “defeat,” United States economic and geopolitical dominance. That dream failed for the Eurozone could not turn away from the Marxist Agenda.

The Neocons are working overtime telling their plants to inform their candidate not to listen to our forecasts. I have encountered this before and this time they are going all out. I find it strange how every intelligence agency wants this info, but members are Congress are being told to keep you distance. This obviously intended to make sure they get their World War III. We will be issuing an update to the Cycle of War for 2026. We will let you know when it shall be released.

QUESTION: Marty, you have said that every religion has undergone some schism. That implies that governments have also seen splits and even civil wars. Is this what Socrates has uncovered that unity cannot exit in ant group setting?

Greg

ANSWER: There have been major upheavals in religion, such as the Byzantine Iconoclasm, a profound religious and political crisis that rocked the Byzantine Empire for over a century (with two main phases: 726–787 and 814–842 AD). While the act of putting Christ’s image on coinage by Emperor Justinian II (c. 692 AD) was a highly significant and a controversial event that intensified theological debate and foreshadowed the coming conflict, it is not considered the beginning of Byzantine Iconoclasm. However, the Muslims were using the Byzantine coinage until this event. That is what caused Islam to begin to issue their own coinage.

Then there was the Great Schism of 1054 in Christianity between the East (Orthodox) and the West (Rome). Sunni-Shi’a divide, which originated in a succession crisis after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632AD. Martin Luther (1483–1546) was the Catalyst for the Protestant Reformation when he nailed his “95 Theses” to the door in 1517AD. Judaism has experienced major ideological fractures and the gradual emergence of distinct movements, particularly in the modern era. Buddhism has a clear history of major schisms, often formalized by councils. Hinduism is inherently pluralistic, so “schism” is less applicable. Daoism in China split primarily along liturgical and lineage lines. The major schism in Shinto is a modern, politically engineered one. Sikhism experienced a major, definitive schism after its 10th Guru. We find that religions have split as we see politically in nation-states.

To me, this demonstrates that there will ALWAYS be a division among nations for politics is even more divisive. If religions split, the division of a nation into groups of political views is much more possible than religion.

South Korea sentencing former President Yoon Suk Yeol to five years in prison over his martial law attempt is a major historical event because it cuts straight to the heart of what always happens when a leader believes he personally IS the state. The court found him guilty of abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and falsifying official documents, all tied to that failed martial law move.

Martial law exists in most constitutions as a last-resort mechanism because once a head of state tries to invoke it for political survival, it is no longer governance. It becomes the weaponization of government against the people. Yoon panicked when it became apparent that he was facing impeachment. Blaming North Korea, Yoon declared emergency martial law for a full three hours before it was overturned by Parliament.

The former president was sentenced to five years in prison, a small price to pay considering there were calls for the death penalty. South Korea has not carried out a execution in three decades. “Calling for the death penalty for Yoon is not a matter of choice but a necessity and cannot be considered excessive,” said Moon Geum-ju, a Democratic Party floor spokesperson. Executing a former head of state does not inspire confidence to say the least.

When we look at the Monthly Array from 2023, we can see that the major turning point would be April 2024, which the computer was projecting from November 2023. The April 10, 2024, election, when all 300 members of the National Assembly were elected, 254 from first-past-the-post constituencies and 46 from proportional party lists. The two largest parties, the Liberal Democratic Party and the conservative People Power Party, once again set up satellite parties to take advantage of the electoral system.

The election served as a “mid-term evaluation” of President Yoon Suk-yeol’s administration, which is nearing its third year. The question became whether the ruling party could surpass the constraints of the ruling coalition, which did not secure a majority in the previous general election. The election saw opposition parties, primarily the Democratic Party, retain their majority in the National Assembly. We can see that the numerous Directional Changes thereafter ensured a divided political state.

South Korea has a long history of prosecuting former leaders after they leave office. But this case is uniquely important because it wasn’t just a bribery scandal or political persecution. Yoon is being held accountable for permitting his own ambitions to override the constitution and crossing a line that no leader in a constitutional republic is permitted to cross.

Leaders start thinking they can rule by decree. They silence opponents. They use state power to protect themselves. And when they fall, the entire system suffers the aftershock. The markets may shrug for a day, but society doesn’t.

Governor Tim Walz threatened to command the state National Guard to attack federal agents. “We do not need any further help from the federal government. To Donald Trump and Kristi Noem, you’ve done enough. I’ve issued a warning order to prepare the Minnesota National Guard,” Walz said in a press event. “We have soldiers in training and prepared to be deployed if necessary. I remind you, a warning order is a heads-up for folks,” Walz said. “Minnesota will not allow our community to be used as a prop in a national political fight.” Now, Washington is considering invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy US troops to Minnesota.

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, ” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.

We live in a world where states are openly defying the federal government, toying with the idea of separatism, as politics have become too divided for the states to remain united. The 1807 Insurrection Act permits US presidents to unilaterally deploy federal military personnel within the US to restore law and order.

Fifteen different presidents have invoked the Insurrection Act on 30 separate occasions throughout US history. The Insurrection Act was last utilized by President George Bush in May 1992 during the Los Angeles riots. President Trump has the authority to invoke the Act, and if chaos prevents federal agents from carrying out tasks, he may be forced to deploy the military. Shaken by the threat, Walz is asking Trump to “turn the temperature down,” and “stop this campaign of retribution.” Yet, Walz boldly declared he would command state troops to defy Washington.

The unrest in Minnesota is largely due to paid agitated actors who take orders from dark money NGOs controlled by the globalist elite, but I will discuss that matter in a separate post. Democrats like Walz are deliberately creating unrest ahead of the midterm elections. The plan has been to force Washington into a corner where force must be met with force to maintain order. Trump’s presidency will be met with resistance at every corner, as the computer warned, as Washington now faces enemies both domestic and international.

Peace was never an option. The Russia-Ukraine war was plotted out over a decade ago by people unassociated with either nation. The Plot to Seize Russia explains everything in detail. Yeltsin handed Putin the reins to protect Russia from the oligarchs. The West installed Zelensky to quietly control Ukraine and position it for battle. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the Minsk Agreement was a lie, an appeasement to pass time to allow Ukraine to build its military.

World leaders continually declare that Russia shows no signs of accepting peace. “What we’ve seen is the huge commitment to work being done by Ukraine, with the US and supported by Europe to draw up plans for peace including security guarantees,” Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper said. “But so far, I don’t see the evidence that Putin is yet willing to come to the table, or yet willing to have discussions.”

“Most importantly, we want peace and harmony to reign in Ukraine, and we are ready to work together with other countries to do everything to facilitate and support such a development,” President Putin stated on March 17, 2014, during his reunification speech.

“For eight years, for eight long years, we have done everything possible to resolve the situation by peaceful political means,” Putin said on a televised address on February 24, 2022, when Russia began its “special military operation” in Ukraine. Moscow was prepared to honor the Minsk Agreement, but Europe was not. The Minsk Agreement is paramount. Putin has repeatedly called for peace over the past four years.

“We are set on serious negotiations with Ukraine. Their aim is to eliminate the root causes of the conflict and to achieve a long‑term lasting peace for a historical perspective,” the Russian President said in May 2025 when he discussed a potential ceasefire. Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman, reiterated readiness for “a peaceful settlement to end the war.”

The headlines continue to spit out propaganda—peace is not an option. Peace IS an option for Russia, and perhaps Ukraine, but the neocon elite simply will not allow the war to end. Zelensky seemed willing to accept a peace deal in 2022, but the UK’s Boris Johnson promptly talked him out of accepting the deal.

I submitted my peace proposal to Washington in November 2025. The Trump Administration, perhaps with the guidance of my proposal, created a strategy for peace that only one side was willing to accept.

War is a great way to default on debts. You get to form a new government, and they always disavow the debts of the previous government. Europe has been committing economic suicide. Between the COVID-19 Lockdowns, the NET-ZERO Climate Change, and then the sanctions on Russia that doubled their fuel costs, you could not ask for a more brain-dead group of politicians who have ZERO comprehension of even how the economy functions.

COMMENT #1: Marty, I tried to get my brother to read your blog and he said it was depressing. I tried to explain that you always say that there is a light at the end of this tunnel and it will be our opportunity to redesign the system for the better. We cannot accomplish that goal if we do not understand what needs to be fixed. I can see the problem. He will be swept up in the rhetoric of the left and this is how society is dividing. It’s hard to imagine we came from the same parents. At the core, they do not want to admit that their ideas are wrong and to achieve their perfect Marxist Utopia, we must surrender all personal freedom. I understand you have tried to warn the world in hoping to reduce the amplitude of the event. The self interests of the left and the neocons attack you because you have the track record to support your warnings while others have only opinions.

History will remember you. Not the muckrakers with only opinion. As always, they attack the messenger rather than confront the news.

Paul

COMMENT #2: The biggest criticism I have heard about you is not that cyclical analysis works, but you are the largest advisor that ever was and as such you have too much influence. Would you address that criticism?

Remi

QUESTION #1: I always have hope Marty, if we have no hope, we lose everything. I think people are more aware of what’s happening and who is pulling the strings and forcing us into these wars.  The question is, how do we remove the neocons, how do we stop the madness, does it require an uprising, for those in power will not stop until they succeed. We need people to pull in the same direction, and also to ensure that our freedom of speech is not eroded.  You can already see they are trying to shut down these channels.  How can we, the great unwashed fight back if we dont fight together in an organised and legal manner ?

REPLY: You’ve pinpointed a core tension in economic thought. There has been this animosity that dominates economics stemming from different sources and targets different aspects of “cyclical analysis” and the hatred of those of us who have dared to even use cyclical analysis. The fear is not simply that “humans cannot alter the business cycle,” but rather a deeper philosophical and methodological rejection of the inevitability and predictability implied by some cyclical theories, especially when they challenge the efficacy of policy or the fundamental stability of the current economic system. Without socialism, government cannot promise the moon and when the cycles conflict with their agenda, it is always time to kill the messenger.

I have dealt with heads of state when there was a time when intelligent people held such offices. Both Margaret Thatcher kept Britain out of the Euro for she instinctively understood it was the backdoor way to federalize Europe. It was her own cabinet that staged a coup to try to surrender British sovereignty for a dream of the euro that was absurd. They actually believed that combining with a single currency, their GDP would be larger than the USA and Europe would rise again to lead the world. I warned them it would require (1) debt consolidation, which they rejected because they did not trust each other, and (2) they would have to abandon Marxism which their heads would turn around  and spit out green fluid as in the Omen at just the thought of a free economy.

Even my dealings with Mikhail Gorbachev were also impressive insofar as he too understood cycles instinctively. Gorbachev resurrected Kondratieff who Stalin executed because he too did not like his message that capitalism would not die. He grasped that the USSR was collapsing and it was precisely on time. He choose to go with the cycle rather then try to fight it.

Mikhail Gorbachev understood our forecast that Communism would collapse in 1989. He embraced the cyclical reality and was the correct man at the correct time to help with the transition without bloodshed. The Economic Confidence Model gave us 1989 for the collapse of Communism, but it was the 224 Year Cycle of Political Change that gave us 1992 and the breakup of the USSR.

As far as having too uch influence, that is the typical view from people who utterly fail to understand that cycles exist, and their inability to see the world or to dynamically think connecting the dots from all fields of science rather than the typical linear thinking process. They try to reduce everything to a single cause and effect like global warming is entirely due to CO2. It was the massive droughts in Asia that sent Attila the Hun to invade Europe. It was the eruption of Thera that wiped out the Minoan society. It was the climate change to cold that sent the sea people to wipe out Bronze Age city states.

They cannot connect the dots. Here is Larry Summers who thinks that if you simply forecast, you then influence the outcome. Sorry, it does not work that way. Yes, we are probably the biggest ever. But we have clients with even trillion dollar portfolios. That does NOT mean they simply do as I say. They take the forecasts and run it through their own due diligence. They understand that everything is connected and there are so many variables, it does take a computer to keep track of everything.

Karl Marx saw the Cycle as a Symptom of Doom. Marx didn’t just describe a business cycle; he described a crisis cycle inherent to capitalism. For Marx, these cyclical crises were not accidental flaws but necessary features of a system built on internal contradictions (e.g., the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). They would grow progressively worse until the system collapsed. Stalin has Kondratieff executed because he saw that the decline in the business cycle was how it rejuvenated the system and it would not die but be reborn each time. Joseph Schumpeter described this as waves of creative destruction. The invention of the automobile put the horse and buggy people out of business. The Internet put a lot of local businesses out of the economy as they could not compete just as AI is starting to also change aspects within the economy.

Mainstream (neoclassical) economics has always been profoundly hostile to this view of cyclical analysis. Why? This threatens the System Legitimacy that government has the power to manage the economy. If crises are inevitable, then the entire system is delegitimized. How can a politician run for office promising change if the business cycle cannot be altered? This is an existential threat, not just a technical disagreement.

Marx’s cycle theory suggests that policy tweaks (like those later proposed by Keynes) are merely band-aids on a mortal wound. The animosity, therefore, comes from a political and ideological fear that accepting a Marxist cyclical analysis means accepting the inevitability of revolution and the futility of reform. The fear is that if people believe the cycle is an inescapable death spiral, they will seek to overthrow the system. This appears to be a desperate assessment and they love to blame the disparity of wealth as the culprit. However, the disparity of wealth is by no means confined to the individual.

A nation can be the richest in natural resources like Russia, but this suppression of individual freedom ensured the economic stagnation of communism for innovation always comes from the individual – not government. That was well illustrated in the famous Kitchen debate of 1959 between Khrushchev and VP Richard Nixon where he demonstrated all of the innovations from the private sector.

John Maynard Keynes: The Cycle as a Failure of Aggregate Demand
Keynes shifted the focus. For him, the business cycle was driven by fluctuations in aggregate demand, primarily investment, influenced by volatile “animal spirits.” The cycle was a persistent malfunction of a market economy, not its inevitable death knell.

Keynes’s Goal was ALTERATION of the cycle and his whole project was to demonstrate that humans could and should alter the business cycle through government intervention (fiscal and monetary policy) to smooth out booms and busts.

The Source of Animosity (toward Keynes): This came later, from two powerful schools:

Monetarists (Milton Friedman):

Friedman argued that the cycle could be managed through steady, rules-based monetary policy, but that Keynesian fine-tuning was dangerous and destabilizing. Their animosity was toward the activist, discretionary aspect of Keynesian alteration, not the idea of some control.

New Classical Rejection of Cyclical Analysis:

The classical academics launched a methodological and ideological attack on the very foundation of cyclical analysis as a policy guide. They argued that what look like cycles are actually optimal responses to exogenous shocks (like technology changes). The economy is always in equilibrium. There is no inherent “cycle” to alter—only efficient adjustments to surprises.

However, the the conflict emerges from the realization that government attempts to “alter the cycle” are not just futile but actively harmful, creating distortions and inflation. The fear is of hubristic policy making based on a flawed model. They argued that if people are rational, they will anticipate government policy, rendering systematic Keynesian stabilization policies ineffective. We see this in market activity when the interest rate is changes and the market moves opposite of expectations and the response is that it was already factored into the market price.

The Modern Dominance goes out of its way to insist that this is all random “Fluctuations,” not regular “Cycles.” The classical academics have gone as far as to discard the term “business cycle” attempting to drive this out of favor in mainstream macroeconomics, replacing it with “economic fluctuations” or “boom and bust” cycles.

Why? “Cycle” implies a predictable, endogenous, wave-like pattern with regularity (like the Kondratieff wave or Juglar cycle). This suggests inevitability and, perhaps, a theory like Marx’s. The Preferred Model is emerging as the dominant framework (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium – DSGE) models the economy as being hit by random shocks. The resulting “fluctuations” are not predestined cycles but the complex outcome of these shocks propagating through the system. They cannot grasp the complexity that the business cycle cannot be reduced to a single isolated cause and effect.

The implication is serious. If there is no predictable cycle, the goal is not to “alter a cycle” but to improve the economy’s resilience to shocks (through flexible markets, credible central banks, and sound institutions) and to use monetary policy to stabilize prices and, to a lesser extent, output. Yet this has proven to be futile. Even Paul Volcker, the renown former Chairman of the Federal Reserve in his Rediscovery of the Business Cycle published in 1978, admitted that Keynesian Economics failed in 1974/1975.

Arthur Burns, who was the Fed Chairman in 1971 when the gold standard collapsed under Bretton Woods, also concluded that the business cycle always wins. The academic economists refuse to even investigate the business cycle because if there is a cycle of regularity, then their theories are worthless.

The Austrian School Exception
It’s worth noting the Austrian School (Hayek, Mises), which embraces a cyclical theory (the boom-bust cycle caused by central bank-induced credit expansion) but is also profoundly hostile to Keynesian alteration. Their argument is that intervention prolongs and deepens the necessary correction. Their animosity is toward the alterer, not the analysis.

COMPLEXITY
The animosity toward cyclical analysis is multifaceted where with linear analysis, the goal is always to reduce the blame to a single cause and effect. The main rejection is that they perceive cyclical analysis predicts systemic collapse and they at least respect is tied to revolution, which is why they are waging economic war against Russia currently attempting to cause its collapse and/or revolution.

Against the idea of a predictable cycle that can be fine-tuned by discretionary policy, we must comprehend that humans cannot successfully alter the business cycle without making things worse,  simply because they lack the understanding of the complexity behind it. The academic economists would be discredited as their preference for rules-based policy or a belief that most fluctuations are efficient responses. This is like looking at a woman in child birth and ignoring that a child is being born trying to deal with the contractions without knowing their cause.

Linguistic Retreat: The mainstream has abandoned the term “cycle” itself to distance itself from theories of endogenous inevitability and to focus on models of stochastic shocks.

In essence, the animosity toward certain types of cyclical analysis reflects a deeper battle between visions of the economy: Is it a system plagued by inherent, predictable crises? Or is it a fundamentally stable system perturbed by unpredictable shocks? The fear of human inability to alter the cycle is a powerful argument they prefer to dismiss.

All I can say is the foundation of EVERYTHING is a cycle. Here is how sound travels known as the Doppler effect. Stand on the corner and close your eyes. If the sound of a bus grows louder, it is coming toward you. If the sound is fading, the bus is moving away.

Sunlight also travels in cyclical waves. Change the frequency and you get a different effect. There is a cycle to absolutely everything around us. Our computer Arrays are composed of a correlation of 72 individual models. Then there is a global correlation to the frequencies of all other markets. So there is not a single cycle that you can reverse-engineer from an array. It just does not work that way. We simply do cycles differently than most people in the cyclical analysis arena.

Here is the array published in 1999 that nearly 10 years in advance forecast a Panic Cycle in 2008, which became the Great Recession. This is NOT my opinion. This is allowing the computer to analyze TIME. The track record of these forecasts are far beyond what anyone can do from a gut feeling, “I think,” or opinion basis.

I stood up at our 2011 World Economic Conference in Philadelphia and warned that the War Cycle would turn up in 2014. In 2013, I warned that the computer was targeting Ukraine for the 2014 turn in geopolitics. This were not correct forecasts simply because they were my opinion.

A key Soviet offensive in the Kharkiv region in May 1942 ended in a catastrophic defeat for the Red Army, with over 200,000 Soviet soldiers captured. 1942 was the peak year of the “Final Solution” in Ukraine. The Nazi regime, aided by local collaborators and auxiliary police, systematically murdered the vast majority of Ukraine’s Jewish population. By the end of 1942, it is estimated that over 1 million Jews had been murdered on Ukrainian territory.

The Three Major “Revolutionary” Events (Post-Soviet Era) in Ukraine were the Revolution on Granite (October 2–17, 1990), when the government conceded to almost all demands. It was a crucial, non-violent precursor to the declaration of independence in 1991. This was followed by the Orange Revolution (2004–2005) was a definitive expression of Ukraine’s desire for a democratic, European future, though its reforms were later undermined. Then there was the Maidan Revolution of 2014, the Ukrainians renamed to the Revolution of Dignity, (November 2013 – February 2014). This was instigated by the American Neocons led by John McCain and Victoria Nuland insisting the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych’s sudden refusal to sign the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement.

In 2013, the year before the revolution, Russia was Ukraine’s #1 trading partner in terms of total trade volume. Bilateral trade between Ukraine and Russia in 2013 was estimated to be around $40-45 billion. John McCain introduced the climate change agenda which was part of his economic war against Russia. It had nothing to do with climate. It was a push to use nuclear power in Europe to cut off the purchases of energy from Russia in hopes of causing an economic collapse.

Robert McNamara (1916 – 2009) was a leading Neocon that pushed the country into the Vietnam war. Before he died, he finally admitted that they were wrong. They thought Russia was behind the Vietnam War. McNamara admitted Russia was not involved and it was just a civil war. I believe McCain’s hatred of Russia turned on the fact that he was broken and read scripts for the communists as Tokyo Rose. Because he broke, I believe that was the source of his hatred that led him to instigate war with Russia.

The Pentagon sought to protect McCain refusing to release papers on him.

Pentagon Refuses to Release John McCain Confession

The Second Edition of FIAT will be available in a few weeks. This is part of the problem when people blame FIAT for debt and everything as if there were no debt crises before paper currencies. We have to understand what is the actual problem if we ever hope to advance as a society. Highlighting the mistakes allows us to identify them and correct them. Individually, we learn from our personal mistakes (hopefully), but as a society, governments keep changing personel and thus there is no collective ability to learn from past mistakes and as such history repeats because human nature never changes.

Mikhail Gorbachev understood cycles perhaps instinctively like Margaret Thatcher. He was a key figure in the democratic and reform movements during the perestroika and glasnost period. Gorbachev, like Margret Thatcher, was interested in cycles. While not a theorist himself, Gorbachev was very interested in cycles and he understood that it was time for political change in Russia. He attempted in the 1980s to break the cyclical pattern of Soviet economic stagnation and political repression (“The Period of Stagnation”) through reforms (Perestroika and Glasnost).

The Russian Neocons staged their coup. Gorbachev made the fatal mistake of appointing Vladimir Kryuchkov as the head of the KGB. During the first half of 1991, Kryuchkov held two secret
meetings with Robert Maxwell knowing he was an Israeli agent. He revealed a plot to overthrow Gorbachev yet wanted to buy Israel’s support from the West to make it legitimate.

The Spymaster’s Defense: A Portrait of the Man Who Nearly Saved (or Destroyed) the USSR

Anatoly Zhitnukhin’s 440-page biographical study of Vladimir Kryuchkov arrives at a peculiar moment in Russian historical memory. Published in 2016 by Molodaya Gvardiya, the book presents itself as an objective examination of the longtime head of Soviet intelligence who became the chief architect of the failed August 1991 coup. Yet beneath its scholarly veneer lies something more revealing: a rehabilitation project for one of the most controversial figures of late Soviet history.

Zhitnukhin traces Kryuchkov’s trajectory from his participation in the defense and reconstruction of Stalingrad through his diplomatic posting in Hungary (where he witnessed the 1956 uprising firsthand), to his rise within the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, and ultimately to his tenure as KGB Chairman from 1988 to 1991. The title itself—”Time Will Tell“—carries the unmistakable suggestion that history has judged Kryuchkov too harshly, that a reassessment is overdue.

The biography devotes considerable attention to Kryuchkov’s role in the Hungarian events of 1956 and the Afghan War—experiences that shaped his worldview and convinced him that Soviet power required vigilance and, when necessary, force to maintain. These formative episodes illuminate why Kryuchkov would later see Gorbachev’s reforms not as necessary evolution but as existential threat.

However, this book’s most significant contribution—and its most problematic aspect—is its treatment of the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) and the August 1991 coup attempt. Zhitnukhin portrays Kryuchkov and his co-conspirators as patriots desperately trying to prevent the collapse of a great power, not as would-be authoritarians attempting to roll back democracy.

Kryuchkov was the initiator of the GKChP and led the coup attempt that placed Gorbachev under house arrest. The coup involved tanks in Moscow streets, the imprisonment of the Soviet president, and a declaration that Gorbachev had resigned due to “ill health”—a transparent lie. Kryuchkov even dispatched the KGB’s Alpha commando unit to surround Yeltsin’s residence, though he ultimately held back from giving the order to detain him.

Zhitnukhin soft-pedals this indecision, which many historians view as fatal to the coup’s success. Was Kryuchkov’s hesitation a moral boundary he wouldn’t cross, or simply the paralysis of a plotter who hadn’t fully thought through the implications of ordering special forces to arrest a democratically elected president?

The book participates in a broader Russian discourse about the Soviet collapse. After his 1994 amnesty, Kryuchkov returned to public life with writings condemning Gorbachev’s rule, and a 2007 Levada Center poll revealed that only 12% of respondents would have actively opposed his coup. This statistic is chilling—and tells us more about Russian public opinion than about the legitimacy of the coup itself. This is the real danger of Marxism. People often do not want to have to deal with life in general and a free road to nowhere seems better than having to make decisions in life that impact your future.

Zhitnukhin presents Kryuchkov as a man caught between eras, unable to accept that the world had fundamentally changed. This is partially accurate. The coup failed in part because the plotters failed to grasp that democratization had made public opinion important and that the population would no longer meekly obey orders from above. But framing this as tragic misunderstanding rather than attempted authoritarianism is a choice that reveals the book’s sympathies.

This is the major dilemma that we will also face in the West. The LEFT constantly paint themselves as the victim and therein remains the ultimate challenge to redesign the system. This is what Margaret Thatcher understood. You cannot oppress one portion of society for the benefit of another and pretend you are a free democratic state.

Zhitnukhin largely elides the most damning assessment of Kryuchkov’s legacy. Former U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock Jr. argued that Kryuchkov was inadvertently responsible for destroying the very Soviet Union he sought to save. By staging the coup, he destroyed the Communist Party’s remaining authority and accelerated dissolution. As Matlock wrote, the Soviet Union might exist in some modified form today if someone else had been running the KGB in 1990-1991. Kryuchkov’s grab for power to retain Communism exposed the inability of Marxism to correct anything whatsoever for the economy proving that government is incapable of managing a bubblegum machine no less the nation. Stalin’s confiscation of food from Ukraine to pretend that the seizure of farmland by the state was like putting the people in the Division of Motor Vehicles in change of planting food.

The book also glosses over the moral dimension of Kryuchkov’s career. This was a man who headed Soviet foreign intelligence during the Cold War’s final decade, overseeing operations that funded communist movements worldwide, who encouraged the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (where he served as KGB rezident in Kabul during the government overthrow), and who misinterpreted NATO’s Able Archer 83 exercise as preparation for nuclear first strike—nearly triggering catastrophic miscalculation.

Despite these critical shortcomings, Zhitnukhin’s work has value precisely because of its sympathetic lens. To understand why intelligent, experienced officials believed they needed to launch a coup, we must understand their worldview. Kryuchkov genuinely believed the Soviet Union was worth saving and that Gorbachev’s reforms were leading to national disintegration—a view that subsequent events partially vindicated, even if his chosen remedy was worse than the disease.

The Importance of Time Will Tell

The 440-page length allows Zhitnukhin to explore the full arc of Kryuchkov’s life, from Stalingrad to the bathhouse meeting in mid-August 1991 where he convinced other top officials to join the plot. These details humanize a figure often reduced to caricature as a hardline villain. The importance of this work is a glimpse into human nature. The Neocons in the West, especially NATO, act in the very same manner to retain power.

This work was published in 2016—five years into Putin’s third presidential term and two years after the annexation of Crimea. The book’s rehabilitation of Kryuchkov was in line with described the Soviet collapse as the “greatest political catastrophe of the 20th century” – the empire of the Czars, not the Soviet Union. Zhitnukhin’s sympathetic portrait of a man who tried to prevent that collapse aligns with official Russian narratives about the 1990s as a period of chaos and humiliation that strong leadership needed to overcome. Clearly, the book’s subtext: that Kryuchkov’s diagnosis was correct even if his prescription failed.

In Vremya rassudit, Zhitnukhin marshals evidence to portray Kryuchkov as a patriot who made a desperate gamble to save his country, not as an authoritarian who attempted to reverse democratization at gunpoint. The book’s wealth of detail about Kryuchkov’s career makes it a valuable resource, but readers must approach its central argument with skepticism.

The real tragedy may be that Kryuchkov was neither the monster his harshest critics describe nor the misunderstood patriot Zhitnukhin portrays. He was a capable intelligence professional who rose to leadership during a revolutionary transformation he neither understood nor accepted. This is far too often the case where people become indoctrinated by dogma. His attempt to turn back the clock didn’t just fail—it guaranteed the very outcome he feared most. This is an important point for the Neocons of the West in pushing for their endless wars to conquer the Russia of Stalin, which no longer exists. This egotistic quest of hatred from the past will ultimately lead to their destruction just as Kryuchkov ensured the collapse of Communism would become permanent.

Time has indeed told us much about Vladimir Kryuchkov. Whether it has judged him fairly, as Zhitnukhin’s title suggests, depends entirely on whether you believe attempting to overthrow a government through military force can ever be justified by claims of patriotic necessity. This book makes that case as effectively as anyone could. Whether you find it persuasive says as much about your own politics as about Kryuchkov’s legacy.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s public criticism was directed much more explicitly at Stalin than at Lenin. However, his reforms and historical reassessments during Perestroika and Glasnost ultimately undermined the Leninist system as well. Gorbachev was openly and sharply critical of Joseph Stalin, who he portrayed as the “criminal” that distorted socialism. His view of Lenin was initially he was used as the “inspiration” to fix socialism, but the process of reform unleashed forces that ultimately questioned Lenin’s entire project. Thus, Gorbachev’s public criticism focused on:

• The Great Terror and Repressions: He supported the rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims and allowed extensive media exposure of the crimes of the Stalin era.

• Economic and Political System: He blamed Stalin for creating the rigid, centralized command-administrative system (kommandno-administrativnaya sistema) that Gorbachev was trying to reform. He saw Stalinism as a deviation from socialism.

• Historical Reassessment: Under Gorbachev, there was an official condemnation of the Stalinist period, reversing the muted or positive treatment common since the Brezhnev era.

The contrast with China: The key difference was philosophical. While Chinese leaders cracked down violently at Tiananmen to preserve the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, Gorbachev ultimately chose reform and openness, even though it eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The hardline Communists  saw  two  threats,  the fall

Yes, I had contact with Mikhail Gorbachev and I can say that it was his understanding of cycles that it was just time for the collapse of communism that allowed him to take the high road in allowing the collapse of the USSR. I was asked about the 72-year Revolutionary Cycle because I had warned in 1985 that Communism would fall in 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev visited Beijing in May 1989, and his visit coincided with the Tiananmen Square protests. He arrived on May 15, 1989, for a historic summit aimed at normalizing Sino-Soviet relations after decades of tension.

The timing was significant because the student protests in Tiananmen Square were already well underway. The protesters actually used Gorbachev’s visit to gain more international attention for their cause, and the Chinese government found the situation embarrassing since they couldn’t clear the square for the official welcome ceremonies. Some events had to be moved or adjusted because of the ongoing demonstrations.

Gorbachev left Beijing on May 18, 1989. The violent crackdown on the protesters occurred later, on June 3-4, 1989, after he had already departed. Gorbachev’s approach was indeed fundamentally different from China’s, but the key examples played out somewhat differently. Gorbachev essentially refused to use Soviet force to prop up communist regimes in Eastern Europe. This was a dramatic break from past Soviet policy. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 (about 5 months after Tiananmen), he didn’t intervene. Throughout 1989, as communist governments collapsed across Eastern Europe—Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia—Gorbachev rejected the “Brezhnev Doctrine” that had previously justified Soviet military intervention (like in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968). He let these countries chart their own course. The American and European Neocons REFUSE to acknowledge the political change in Russia. They grew up hating communists which they merely transferred to hatred of all Russians. I believe they were just pist off that Communism fell all by itself and they did not get to shoot anybody.

It was Gorbachev who lowered the USSR flag and raised the Russian flag over the Kremlin. The Communists staged a coup in 1991 fearing that he would accept joining NATO and I believe they may have understood that he saw the cyclical future of the USSR. That brought Yeltsin to power. To what extent one can attribute my influence on Gorbachev is debatable. Yes I had contact with Gorbachev regarding cycles. All I can confirm is that he understood cycles I believe instinctively like Thatcher, and that cyclically, it was just time. It was also Gorbachev who acknowledge the tragedy of Kondratieff formally. I was invited to a ceremony in Moscow for Kondratieff, but I could not make it at the time. I sent a representative in my place.

It is our  Neocons who refused to understand cycles and that Gorbachev terminated the USSR and Communism for he understood the cycles were turning. Consequently, the Neocons continually refuse to accept that Russia is no longer trying to spread communism to the world as Khrushchev said – We will bury you. They refuse to let their hatred go. It is the Neocons who hate the Russian people for even if Putin stepped down, they would never change their view of Russia all because of Stalin. Yet they do not hate the German people because of Hitler. Interesting paradox.

Even during the 2007-2009 Great Recession, the bankers/Neocons had me thrown in the hole to try to cut off my communications with the House Financial Service Committee. I have been called in to just about every financial and geopolitical crisis since the mid 1970s. My critics are always from those sources. They cannot beat Socrates, so indeed, you kill the messenger.

The answer is to understand the complexity of cycles and stop trying to (1) manipulate society, and (2) live with the cycle that would allow managing the amplitude. Like Joseph and the Pharaoh. If you understood there would be 7 years of plenty followed by 7 years of famine, you stockpile to reduce the famine when the cycle turns.

PM Carney pre-election (2025):
"Our biggest security threat is China"

PM Carney post-election (2026):
"Our partnership with China sets us up well for the New World Order" pic.twitter.com/ZLZfAH9hR3

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 16, 2026

“The world is still determining what that world is supposed to be…”