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.

A lot of emails have come in about the AI will destroy humanity. The difference between Socrates and Neural Nets is that Socrates has only a economic related database and we have more than anything out there on the internet. That’s why back in 1999, the government freaked out and shut down the IPO we were going to do for $3 billion back then. Socrates is what people call classic AI. That was discussed even in open court.

Neural networks are not “rule-free.” They are trained on data with defined objectives, architectures, and constraints set by their developers. That’s the problem. Giving it free access to the internet, they cannot possibly understand all the ways this can function so they cannot create an iron-clad rule to government what they create.  The AI models don’t have moral reasoning, but they also don’t operate in a vacuum—they’re tools built and deployed by humans. They have failed to properly control some agents.

They are intending to introduce in a few months the recursive ability to allow AI to rewrite its own code and in essence to design the next generation. This is the danger for there are no rules and they are creating a synthetic electronic lifeform that they have no idea of what will be the result. Giving this access to the internet would be a huge risk that nobody would be able to speculate on what comes next. It would still not be self-aware with morals. A robot just follows orders, it does not make judgements based on morality.

That may be what Zelensky is praying for with their claims to have humanoid soldiers. I guess when he runs out a human soldiers this is his backup. He would love it if they engaged in a Russian genocide – Ukrainian history of ethnic cleansing. This hatred between Ukraine and Russia is ethnically interesting for they are like twin brothers who were separated at birth and grew up in to different houses. This is the same as the Arabs and the Jews claiming to be both the children of Abraham. I guess family feuds are the worst.

Argentina’s Javier Milei walked into the United Nations and told the bureaucrats sitting before him exactly what he thought of them. He said the organization had become “useless” and existed to support what he called a caste of “fatally arrogant parasites” masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats. Whether one agrees with Milei’s rhetoric or not, this was not the normal diplomatic garbage where politicians congratulate one another, read speeches written by committees, and then fly home while accomplishing absolutely nothing. He attacked the fundamental question nobody inside these institutions ever wants to discuss: who gave unelected international bureaucracies the authority to dictate how people should live?

Milei went directly after the COVID lockdowns, and this is where his speech will certainly infuriate the establishment. He accused organizations operating under the UN system of placing themselves above scientific evidence and national sovereignty while promoting forced lockdowns around the world. His description was brutal: “a global experiment in social control disguised as science.” He pointed to the destruction of employment, children’s education, access to medical care, and the ability of families even to say goodbye to dying relatives. Milei went further and characterized the resulting avoidable deaths as “genocide.”

The lockdown era demonstrated just how quickly governments will surrender individual liberty when bureaucrats declare an emergency. Businesses that people spent their entire lives building were ordered closed. Children were removed from classrooms. People were prevented from visiting dying parents and grandparents. Governments decided which businesses were “essential,” which jobs mattered, where people could travel, whether they could leave their homes, and in some countries even how far they could walk. Politicians who had never created a business in their lives suddenly possessed the authority to destroy one with the stroke of a pen.

Governments shut down productive capacity and then tried to replace lost income by creating money and borrowing on a scale previously reserved for war. They disrupted supply chains while simultaneously flooding economies with liquidity and then acted astonished when inflation exploded afterward. You cannot order people not to produce, manufacture, travel, or work normally while creating trillions in new purchasing power and expect the economic system to remain unchanged. The bill was merely postponed, and the public paid it through inflation, higher government debt, lost education, damaged businesses, and years of economic distortion.

This is the part Milei understands because Argentina knows better than almost any nation what happens when government believes there is no limit to its authority over the economy. Bureaucrats always insist that this time is different. They never surrender authority voluntarily when the emergency ends because bureaucracy behaves exactly like every other organism where the first objective becomes its own survival.

Milei broadened that criticism beyond COVID. He attacked Agenda 2030, environmental extremism, migration policy, economic regulation, and international institutions attempting to impose political objectives upon sovereign nations. His argument was that when these policies fail, the bureaucracy does not disappear or apologize. It expands. Another conference is organized, another commission is created, another target is established twenty years into the future so that nobody currently responsible will ever be held accountable when it fails.

That is the fundamental problem with supranational government. You can throw your mayor out of office. You can vote against a governor, president, parliament, or congressman. Who exactly do you vote against at the United Nations? Who elected the bureaucrats designing global regulatory frameworks? They influence national governments while remaining several layers removed from the people who must actually live under the policies they promote. Accountability becomes so diluted that nobody is ever responsible for anything.

Milei also attacked efforts to impose global regulation on artificial intelligence, and this may ultimately prove more important than his remarks about COVID. AI represents one of the greatest productivity revolutions of our lifetime. Every government bureaucrat already sees something entirely different. They see something to license, regulate, tax, restrict, and control. Milei pledged that Argentina would instead attempt to place itself at the forefront of AI development. Whether his government succeeds remains to be seen, but the competition itself is unavoidable. Nations that strangle AI development because bureaucrats fear technological change risk watching investment, engineers, companies, and intellectual capital migrate elsewhere.

Milei walked into the United Nations and said out loud what plenty have wanted to say directly to its face. He did not bow or pretend that another room full of bureaucrats somehow possesses the wisdom to manage eight billion human beings. He called them “fatally arrogant parasites” and accused the institution of becoming absolutely useless. Stop trying to regulate how people work, travel, produce energy, use technology, run their businesses, and live their lives from glass castles where nobody ever seems personally accountable when the grand experiment fails. COVID demonstrated how quickly emergency powers can swallow individual liberty, and Milei’s warning is that the same mentality is now migrating into climate policy, economic regulation, migration, and artificial intelligence.

Whatever one thinks of his language or politics, there was something unmistakably different about watching a head of state stand inside the institution itself and tell its leadership that the world does not belong to them. Nations are not laboratory experiments, citizens are not livestock to be managed, and freedom does not exist at the pleasure of some international bureaucracy. Milei did not go there asking these institutions to control the world a little more efficiently. He went there telling them to get their hands off it.

Something is going seriously wrong with American politics when people who constantly speak about defending democracy can contemplate throwing democracy aside when they despise the person who won an election. A new Center for Strategic Politics poll conducted with Liberal Currents surveyed 683 Democratic voters and found that 59% would feel either “very positive” or “somewhat positive” if Donald Trump were removed from office through a military coup supposedly intended to safeguard the Constitution. Another 13% were neutral. Even more disturbing, 29% expressed a positive reaction to the hypothetical assassination of Trump.

Read those numbers again. We are talking about a MILITARY COUP in the United States of America. This is the same country that has spent decades lecturing the rest of the world about democratic institutions and peaceful transfers of power. The entire purpose of constitutional government is that you do not get to overthrow the government simply because you hate the person occupying the White House. Elections have consequences, and when your side loses, you organize, argue your case, go back to the voters, and try again. Once political opponents become enemies who must be removed by force, democracy has already begun to rot from within.

The willingness to view a military overthrow positively is nevertheless astonishing because it shows how easily democratic principles can become conditional. Democracy apparently becomes sacred only when it produces the desired result.

The assassination response is even darker. Why should ANY meaningful portion of the population respond positively to the murder of a political opponent? We have crossed into dangerous territory when political disagreement becomes so emotional that the death of the person on the other side begins to look like an acceptable political outcome. Many are willing to simply turn to violence rather than go through the standard democratic procedure.

There is broader evidence that left-wing political violence has increased, although the facts are considerably more complicated than partisan rhetoric suggests. The Center for Strategic and International Studies found that left-wing terrorist attacks and plots increased over the preceding decade and that 2025 became the first year in more than three decades when attacks attributed to the violent left outnumbered those attributed to the violent far right.

The moment you start explaining why violence against your opponent is somehow understandable, you have abandoned the rule of law. It does not matter whether the victim is Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, a Democratic politician, an ICE agent, a Republican congressman, or some anonymous citizen attending a political rally. If you excuse political violence when your opponents are attacked, you surrender the moral authority to complain when the violence eventually comes for you.

America has been down this road before. Political violence erupted throughout the late 1960s and 1970s from revolutionary organizations across the ideological spectrum. Bombings, assassinations, riots, and attacks on government institutions did not produce some enlightened political paradise. They produced fear, repression, greater government surveillance, and an expansion of state power. Violence ALWAYS becomes the excuse government needs to take more power because frightened populations willingly surrender freedoms politicians could never take from them during peaceful times.

This is what both sides should understand before cheering the destruction of their opponents. You may despise Trump. You may despise Democrats. You may believe the government is corrupt beyond redemption. None of that changes the basic equation. Once military coups and assassination become acceptable tools of politics, elections become meaningless because political power ultimately belongs to whoever controls the guns.

The Constitution was designed precisely to prevent that outcome. Presidents leave through elections, constitutional succession, impeachment, resignation, incapacity procedures, or the expiration of their terms. The military does not decide who governs the United States. Assassins do not decide. Mobs do not decide. If those principles become negotiable whenever people convince themselves that the other side represents some existential evil, then eventually every election becomes an existential struggle in which almost anything can be justified.

That is how republics destroy themselves. They rarely collapse because everybody suddenly wakes up and announces that democracy has ended. They decay when each faction gradually decides that constitutional restraints apply only when convenient and that violating those restraints is justified because the other side is supposedly worse. Once enough people embrace that mentality, there is no longer a constitutional system to defend. There are merely competing tribes fighting over who gets to control the state.

Americans had better reject political violence regardless of which flag the person committing it happens to wave. Otherwise, the greatest threat to the republic will not come from Russia, China, Iran, or any foreign enemy. It will come from Americans who have become so consumed by political hatred that they would rather destroy the constitutional system than accept that sometimes their side loses an election.

Kamala Harris has now accused Republicans of “cheating by purging voter rolls.” Stop and think about how insane American politics has become when maintaining an accurate voter-registration database can be casually described as cheating. The controversy concerns efforts to remove people who are no longer eligible or properly registered, including noncitizens, deceased voters, duplicates, and people who have moved. Federal elections are already restricted to American citizens. That is not some new Trump invention.

What I cannot comprehend is why this has become partisan at all. Only citizens may vote in federal elections. Why should anyone care whether that citizen votes Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or writes Donald Duck on the ballot? Verify that the person is eligible, protect the legitimate voter from being wrongly removed, count the legal vote, and move on. Instead, Washington has managed to transform even the basic question of WHO IS ELIGIBLE TO VOTE into another tribal political war.

The SAVE America Act would go considerably further by requiring documentary proof of citizenship when registering for federal elections and photo identification when voting. Supporters argue that citizenship should actually be verified rather than merely attested to. Critics point out that millions of legitimate American citizens may not readily possess the required documents and warn that poorly designed verification systems can prevent eligible citizens from registering. Both issues can exist simultaneously. Noncitizens should not vote, and citizens should not be stripped from voter rolls because an incompetent government database cannot recognize that someone became a naturalized American.

The National Conference of State Legislatures says audits generally find extremely small numbers of noncitizens registered or voting. That does not mean the law should simply be ignored because violations are uncommon. Bank fraud is relatively uncommon compared with legitimate transactions, but nobody argues that banks should therefore stop verifying who owns an account. The objective should be a system where every eligible citizen can vote and nobody who is legally ineligible can cast a ballot.

What should outrage people is that politicians have turned confidence in elections into another weapon against one another. Democrats warn that Republicans are suppressing legitimate voters. Republicans warn that Democrats are protecting ineligible registrations. Then both sides scream “cheating” before an election has even taken place. That is how confidence in the entire system is destroyed because whichever side loses has already been handed an excuse to claim that the rules themselves were illegitimate.

The United States has Social Security records, passport records, immigration records, naturalization records, state driver’s license databases, death records, tax records, and more. Washington can track your income to make sure you paid every penny of tax, yet somehow verifying that an individual is an eligible American voter has become an impossible philosophical question. Government knows when you owe it $600, but suddenly becomes helpless when asked to maintain an accurate voter-registration database.

When politicians start calling ordinary election administration “cheating,” while the other side casually implies enormous fraud without evidence, they are playing with something far more important than the next election. A republic survives only as long as the public believes that political power can change hands through legitimate elections. Destroy that confidence long enough and people eventually stop believing that elections settle anything at all. That is the path politicians on BOTH sides should be terrified of creating.

Britain is institution their version of the Ministry of Truth to shut down all dissent where democracy is now one sided. There will be no anti-war commentary in the UK permitted. They are intent on going to war with Russia.

Of course, he blames Russia for the division in the UK which is all over their migration policies to flood the country with people who will always vote LABOUR so they can dominate the country.

This Ministry of Truth is what governments ALWAYS do through out history when they are afraid that they are losing a grip on power. This is NOT something unique. It is a standard political practice that has been around for thousands of years. People have been imprisoned for both what they may say and what they may write. This is just a sign of the times.

COMMENT: Well, Socrates does it again. It was a landslide in Russia for the pro-war camp, as you said; Zelensky was trying to achieve this result in hopes of bringing on World War III. You also said that if the dollar closes above 3.09 against Israel’s currency, that war can lead to a full-blown Middle East War. I don’t know how Socrates does it. What you discovered is like penicillin for geopolitics.

PH

ANSWER: Sometimes I wish I was one of those people with a mask on driving by myself with the windows up thinking the government really cares. Netanyahu is obsessed with destroying Iran. Zelensky is obsessed with creating World War III to destroy Russians and cares nothing about all the death and carnage he will cause. The real danger here is that they will merge these two wars.

Russia held its State Duma elections from September 18 to 20, 2026. The pro-Kremlin United Russia party won a record-breaking landslide, but the election was widely criticized internationally as neither free nor fair because they want to believe their own propaganda that Russia is losing and the people will surrender to whatever terms they demand. The election was spot on because the Russians realize that the West will NEVER accept them whatsoever and that they are the most hated ethnically by Europeans in general. You have military and political people saying Russia needs to be broken up. They want it destroyed. Why would any sound person in Russia vote otherwise and no longer defend their country? That would never happen in the West.

According to the Central Election Commission, with over 95% of votes counted, United Russia won 57.83% of the vote, securing 355 out of 450 seats. This was in line with our computer establishing a historic high and a constitutional supermajority where we saw resistance at 60%.

The Communist Party (KPRF) came second with 13.81% of the vote, gaining 40 seats. The younger generation does NOT want a resturn to communism. This was the older generation that wants a free lunch and to be just taken care of as they face the nursing home in their life.

LDPR: Received 8.98% of the vote, winning 25 seats and the New People came in at 7.96% of the vote and 20 seats. The Just Russia barely missed the 5% threshold, but appeared to have secured a few seats.

Official turnout was reported at a record 59.3%.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas who would advocate genocide of all Russians stated that the vote was a “severe setback for democracy” and that “only the veneer of democracy remains in Russia.” She accused the Kremlin of silencing dissent, excluding the only registered anti-war party (Yabloko), and barring international observers. Lets look at the facts. This vicious woman has publicly called for the breakup of Russia. The people know that the EU is preparing for war. I think if Putin said the EU should be broken up or the United States, you would see the same result – not surrender.

The result solidifies President Putin’s control over the parliament, allowing United Russia to pass laws and even initiate constitutional amendments without support from other parties. With many war veterans elected as deputies, the new Duma is expected to be a continuation of the war effort.

These European Leaders are stupid along with the Neocons in US and EU want another endless war and they will get it next year. I have warned, but nobody listens despite the fact that this is NOT my personal opinion. The computer shows the West will lose, China, North Korea among others will join Russia because they know they would be next. How ignorant do you have to be not to see the future right before your eyes?

Zelensky will destroy Ukraine. It will not survive.

Europe negotiated in bad faith and NEVER wanted peace. All they had to do was honor the Minsk Agreement that they and Ukraine signed with Russia, allow the Russians in the Donbas vote when they claim they are defending democracy, another lie!

Germany and France were there. They played Putin for a fool. There would never have been this war had they just honor the agreement that they signed. There are just people who think how much money they will make from war. Just like the 1934 book on those who profited from World War I – the Merchants of Death. Nothing has changed.

PRIVATE BLOG – Why WWIII Comes in 2027

Private blog posts are exclusively available to Socrates subscribers. To sign-up for Socrates or to learn more, please visit Ask-Socrates.com.

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Iran is now watching its economy unravel in real time. The Statistical Center of Iran reports that GDP collapsed 10.1% during the first quarter of the Iranian calendar year, from March 21 through June 20, compared with the same period last year. Take oil out of the calculation and the economy still contracted 4.6%. This is not some minor technical recession that economists can explain away with seasonal adjustments. Oil and natural gas activity collapsed 26.4%, industry and mining fell 14.7%, services declined 4.8%, and manufacturing contracted 2.5%. Agriculture was practically the only major sector still moving in the opposite direction, growing 2.3%.

Iran has lived under sanctions for decades, but this is different because the country is now being hit simultaneously by war, collapsing oil revenue, disrupted trade, inflation, currency depreciation, and declining domestic production. That combination is lethal to an economy because each problem feeds the next.

The oil numbers are astonishing. Iranian crude and condensate loadings reportedly fell from around 2 million barrels per day in March to roughly 740,000 barrels per day in July and only about 220,000 to 255,000 barrels per day in August. OPEC data showed Iranian crude production itself dropping by 399,000 barrels per day during August to approximately 2.09 million barrels per day. Oil is not merely another Iranian industry. It is one of Tehran’s primary sources of hard currency, which is why restricting those exports strikes directly at the government’s ability to finance imports and support the domestic economy.

The people always pay the price before government does. Iran’s 12-month average inflation reached 69.9%, while the rial recently traded above 2.2 million to the dollar after being around 1 million only a year earlier. Official unemployment reached 9.1% during the spring, with roughly 450,000 fewer people employed than a year earlier. Average monthly wages reportedly cover less than one-third of basic household expenses. Imagine working every month and discovering that your paycheck covers perhaps ten days of what your family actually needs. That is when people stop believing government statistics because they experience the collapse every time they walk into a market.

This is why currency matters far more than politicians understand. People do not wake up one morning and suddenly decide they hate their government because GDP fell 10.1%. They become angry because their money no longer buys food, savings disappear, medicine becomes unaffordable, electricity becomes unreliable, businesses close and their children cannot find employment. The government can manipulate statistics and blame foreigners all it wants, but it cannot manipulate what someone can afford when they walk into a grocery store.

The rial tells the story that politicians cannot hide. When confidence disappears, people move away from government money into whatever they believe will preserve purchasing power. They buy dollars, gold, property, cryptocurrency, commodities, or anything tangible. This is why governments facing economic crises invariably impose more controls rather than admitting their policies have failed. They blame speculators, currency dealers, merchants, foreign governments, and eventually their own citizens because admitting that confidence has collapsed means admitting that government itself is the problem. The Iranian government has responded by expanding its electronic food-coupon program. That alone tells you where this is heading.

Washington should not celebrate this as some clean victory either. Economic warfare always produces consequences well beyond the government being targeted. Ordinary Iranians are absorbing the inflation, unemployment, shortages, collapsing currency, and declining living standards. At the same time, disrupting Iranian energy exports reduces supply in a global oil market already being shaken by instability around Hormuz, Yemen, and Bab el-Mandeb. You can cripple your opponent economically while simultaneously raising energy and shipping costs for everyone else.

There is another lesson here that Washington never seems to understand. Sanctions forced Iran to become increasingly dependent upon China, while the blockade has now gone much further by physically restricting the country’s ability to export crude. China became Iran’s principal remaining oil customer because the West progressively shut Tehran out of its financial and commercial systems. Every round of economic warfare therefore strengthens the incentive for targeted countries to construct trade relationships that bypass the West altogether.

GDP has fallen 10.1%. The oil and gas sector has contracted more than 26%. Industry and mining are down nearly 15%. Inflation is devastating household purchasing power, the rial has lost more than half its value against the dollar in roughly a year, and hundreds of thousands of jobs have disappeared. These are different symptoms of the same collapse in economic confidence.

The Iranian people are being squeezed between their own government’s priorities and an external economic war designed to deprive Tehran of the money required to sustain itself.. The ordinary citizen pays the consequences. Their savings evaporate, their wages buy less, their businesses fail, and their children inherit an economy with fewer opportunities than the generation before them. Governments can survive astonishing economic pain because they control taxation, regulation, money, and ultimately force, but there comes a point when the population simply cannot absorb another decline in its standard of living. Iran is getting dangerously close to discovering where that point lies.