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.

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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 Government Accountability Office estimates that the federal government loses between $233 BILLION and $521 BILLION every year to fraud. We are not talking about total government waste, unnecessary programs, bloated agencies, or interest on the national debt. This estimate is specifically FRAUD affecting federal programs and spending. At the upper end, that works out to more than $1.4 billion every single day.

This is the same government that tells you it desperately needs more revenue. Politicians argue over raising taxes, closing loopholes, increasing enforcement, and extracting another dollar from the productive economy while their own watchdog estimates that hundreds of billions could disappear annually through fraud. If a private corporation told its shareholders that somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion was being lost every year and management could not narrow it down any further, the board would be thrown out.

In Washington, they simply raise the debt ceiling. The GAO’s estimate covers fiscal years 2018 through 2022 and represents an average annual loss. It includes fraud involving programs such as unemployment insurance, pandemic relief, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other federal spending. The range is enormous precisely because the government does not even know the complete extent of the problem. Fraud is deliberately concealed, and agencies frequently lack the data and systems necessary to identify all of it.

Think about the scale. The federal government collected roughly $5 trillion in revenue during fiscal 2025. If fraud is occurring anywhere near the upper end of the GAO’s estimate, the equivalent of roughly 10% of an entire year’s federal revenue could be disappearing through fraudulent activity. Yet Washington behaves as though the problem is that Americans simply are not paying enough taxes. This is what happens when government becomes too large to manage.

Washington now spends trillions of dollars every year through an incomprehensible maze of agencies, grants, contractors, benefits, subsidies, emergency programs, healthcare payments, state transfers, and countless other channels. Nobody sitting in Congress can possibly understand where all of that money ultimately goes. Congress passes thousand-page spending packages that members barely have time to read, much less audit, and then acts surprised when criminals discover that government money is the easiest money in the world to steal.

The pandemic exposed the entire system. Washington panicked and threw money everywhere. The Small Business Administration’s inspector general estimated that more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection Program funds were disbursed. Other government estimates have differed depending upon methodology, but nobody disputes that pandemic programs became an extraordinary target for fraud.

Government was distributing enormous amounts of money at extraordinary speed while verification systems were overwhelmed. Criminals understood immediately what politicians never seem to understand: when you create trillions of dollars and distribute it through bureaucratic programs, somebody will figure out how to steal it. Then taxpayers are expected to replenish the account.

This is why government spending is never free. Every dollar Washington loses has to come from somewhere. It was taxed from somebody, borrowed from somebody, or ultimately financed through a monetary system that has repeatedly expanded to accommodate government debt. People create wealth. Government redistributes it.

And when government spends beyond the productive capacity of the economy, particularly when fiscal stimulus increases demand without creating equivalent supply, it can contribute to inflation. We saw precisely that dynamic during the pandemic. Washington injected enormous fiscal support into an economy where production and supply chains were simultaneously constrained. Too much demand chased too few goods, and consumers ultimately paid for it through higher prices.

Yet politicians continue to behave as though the only question is how much government should spend rather than whether the spending accomplishes anything. The fraud numbers should infuriate every taxpayer because Washington constantly argues over relatively tiny amounts compared with the scale of the losses identified by its own watchdog.

This ties directly into what we are seeing with the federal workforce. Hundreds of thousands of positions have disappeared, yet most Americans outside Washington would struggle to identify precisely what changed in their everyday lives. Now we discover that despite employing millions of people and spending trillions annually, the federal government may still be losing hundreds of billions to fraud. So what exactly are we paying for?

Washington has surpassed $40 trillion in national debt. Interest expense is becoming one of the largest items in the federal budget. The government continues borrowing simply to maintain existing obligations while politicians promise still more programs because promising somebody else’s money remains the easiest way to purchase political support.

The GAO is not some anti-government organization. It is Congress’s own watchdog and it is telling Congress that federal fraud losses are likely somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion EVERY YEAR. Before Washington demands another tax increase, perhaps somebody should first explain where the half-trillion dollars went.

Imagine the people needed to fill a football stadium, multiple times over. Since Trump returned to office, the federal payroll has been cut by an amount roughly equivalent to the entire global workforce of Apple — TWICE. Depending on which government employment series you use, the reduction is between roughly 271,000 and 336,000 workers. Apple employs about 166,000 people worldwide. Think about that for a moment. You could eliminate the equivalent of two companies the size of Apple from the federal payroll, and for most Americans, daily life simply continued.

So I have a very simple question: what were all these people doing? The federal government still employs more than TWO MILLION civilian workers. OPM’s latest data show about 2.02 million federal civilian employees remaining as of July. Government did not disappear. Social Security checks did not suddenly stop because Washington had fewer diversity coordinators, administrators, consultants, managers, analysts, and layers of bureaucracy.

This is how bureaucracy grows. Government creates a program. The program requires employees. The employees require managers. The managers require administrators. Then somebody needs to evaluate the administrators, somebody needs to write the regulations, somebody needs to ensure compliance with the regulations, and somebody else needs to prepare reports explaining why the department needs a larger budget next year. There is virtually no natural mechanism forcing government to become more productive because government does not operate under the same discipline as the private sector.

Apple has to produce something people voluntarily purchase. If it wastes enough money and produces products nobody wants, eventually shareholders revolt and competitors take its customers. Government has no such discipline. It simply sends the taxpayer another bill.

There is also an important distinction that Washington does not want people to understand. Cutting the federal workforce is NOT the same thing as cutting federal spending. Personnel costs are only one portion of an enormous federal budget. The Federal Reserve reports that the federal deficit has remained around 6% of GDP in fiscal 2025 and so far in fiscal 2026. Federal spending overall has continued to rise, while debt has now surpassed $40 trillion. So anyone claiming that eliminating a few hundred thousand government jobs has somehow solved America’s fiscal crisis is dreaming.

That is precisely the point. If you can remove hundreds of thousands of positions and government spending STILL increases, then the bureaucracy was never the entire problem. The problem is the entire fiscal structure of government: entitlement obligations, defense spending, subsidies, transfers, interest on the debt, grants, contracts, and programs that politicians from BOTH parties refuse to touch.

Government spending matters for inflation because government is another source of demand competing for the same labor, materials, energy, housing, equipment, and services as the private sector. When government dramatically increases spending without a corresponding increase in productive capacity, it can add inflationary pressure. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimated that pandemic-era fiscal stimulus contributed substantially to the surge in aggregate demand that helped produce the inflation of 2020-2022. This does not mean every dollar Washington spends automatically creates inflation. It means there is no magical exemption from supply and demand simply because the buyer happens to be the federal government.

This is where politicians deliberately confuse spending with prosperity. Government can hire 100,000 people and announce that it “created jobs.” Fine. But where did the money come from? Taxes remove capital from the private economy. Borrowing competes for capital in the debt markets and leaves taxpayers with the obligation to service it. Monetary expansion can ultimately undermine purchasing power. There is no secret government treasure chest beneath Washington filled with free money.

The DOGE reductions themselves were not free either. The Government Accountability Office found that the deferred resignation program resulted in nearly 140,000 workers leaving while the government spent about $6.7 billion paying employees associated with that program while they were on administrative leave. OPM argues that was a one-time expense that will generate roughly $20 billion in annual savings, while critics point out that some agencies subsequently had to hire people back into similar occupations. That is exactly why government efficiency should be measured by actual services delivered per taxpayer dollar, not by politicians holding up a headcount and declaring victory.

But the scale of the reduction should still make Americans think. If a private corporation eliminated the equivalent of TWO APPLES from its workforce, everyone would expect something dramatic to happen to its output. Factories would close. Products would disappear. Customers would wait months for service. Yet the federal government has eliminated hundreds of thousands of positions and most Americans would struggle to identify what materially changed in their everyday lives because of those specific personnel reductions.

The real test should be brutally simple: what service does this position provide to the public, what does it cost, and what happens if it disappears? If nobody can provide a coherent answer, perhaps the taxpayer should not be forced to finance it merely because somebody created the position twenty years ago.

Washington has accumulated $40 trillion in debt, and the interest bill itself is becoming one of the largest expenses of the federal government. We are reaching the stage where taxpayers increasingly work not to finance tomorrow’s infrastructure or productive investment but to service yesterday’s political promises. That is how sovereign debt crises develop. Governments do not wake up one morning bankrupt. They accumulate obligations year after year because every expenditure has a constituency and every reduction is portrayed as catastrophe.

The federal workforce reduction has therefore produced an extraordinarily useful experiment. Remove hundreds of thousands of positions and observe what actually breaks. Where essential services deteriorate, correct the mistake. Where nothing meaningful happens, do not automatically refill the chair.

Government should exist to perform necessary functions for the people. The people do not exist to provide permanent employment for the government.

The deeper problem remains spending itself. America cannot solve a $40 trillion debt problem by trimming payroll while continuing to expand total expenditures. But if Washington has just demonstrated that hundreds of thousands of positions can disappear while ordinary Americans largely continue their lives, then perhaps it is time to ask the question politicians and bureaucrats never want asked: how much of this government did we ever actually need?

Many people have asked how bad it will get. Will there be civil war and blood in the streets? I do not see a revolution in the United States in the sense that one side is all-powerful and seeks to eradicate its opponent. The risk that the United States will break up, as in Canada and Europe, does not imply outright civil war. The break will likely come first, and it will form along the lines of the LEFT vs. the RIGHT.

The good news is that the fall of the West is inevitable since no political state lasts forever. However, this time it is different, for it is not people rising up against tyranny that produces the blood in the streets as in the American and French Revolutions. Here we are dealing with the facade of Republican forms of government worldwide that have become unresponsive to the people, but are economically crumbling from within at their very foundations.

This is the Sovereign Debt Crisis. The fall of the West can be largely silent, much like the fall of the Soviet Union. As I have said many times, Russia collapsed all by itself because COMMUNISM was not economically sustainable. Here in the West, rising “progressive” movements are also undermining the economy; like the USSR, they are economically inefficient.

A USSR-style collapse of the United States, a sudden, negotiated dissolution of the entire federal union into separate successor states, without a civil war, is highly unlikely without a Sovereign Default. The key is the government’s ability to muster forces against the people. That requires the fiscal capability that becomes nonexistent in the middle of a Sovereign Debt Default. Therefore, a non-violent collapse is not theoretically impossible. The historical conditions that allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve peacefully are largely absent in the American context, and most scholarly assessments point toward either continued institutional decay or a violent rupture rather than a clean “velvet divorce.”

What is not considered is the CONTAGION effect. As I have said many times, the prevailing view is that Greek political ideas, including democratic theory, influenced Rome, not the other way around. Roman political theory and practice developed later and in dialogue with Greek thought. Cicero, Rome’s great political theorist, drew heavily on Greek philosophy and political models.

Plato and Aristotle’s ideal cities drew on a mix of Athenian democracy and the Roman constitution, showing that Greek thinkers were aware of and analyzing Rome, but the foundational democratic ideas were Greek.

The events were nearly simultaneous, a CONTAGION effect, but the Roman Republic was an aristocratic republic, not a democracy in the Athenian sense. Patrician families and the Senate dominated it, with only limited popular participation through assemblies. Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers adopted the Roman model, limiting the people’s role.

Many other Greek city-states adopted democracy after Athens, though it is important to understand that Athenian democracy was not the sole origin of the idea, and the “CONTAGION” was more of a political wave than a simple export. Scholarship has identified numerous city-states (poleis) that experienced democratic government during the Classical period (roughly 480–323BC).

We see this same wave of political change sweep Europe with the French Revolution following the American Revolution. Fast forward to Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall falls within weeks. Our computer has identified these waves of political change that sweep the world. It doesn’t even have to start in the United States. You are witnessing a rising separatist movement in Canada and even the UK. The same will happen in Europe.

This idea of always attacking the rich has been humanity’s dark side for thousands of years. Ancient Sparta was a communist state that never issued coins, denying wealth to its citizens. Even societies that have advanced required (1) a disparity of wealth that becomes the excess pool to invest in startups, and (2) a financial market to provide liquidity. Every society that provided that since ancient times rose to the top. Those that did not remained as third-world city-states.

The entire Marxist Agenda tried desperately to eliminate the business cycle by altering human nature. This created economic unsustainability, a fundamental cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse from within. The system suffered from deep, long-term structural flaws that made it unable to adapt, and specific policy failures in the 1980s accelerated its decline. Even Trump, in his attempt to make America Great Again, fails to understand a very basic cause for the loss of manufacturing.

President Grover Cleveland was the only one who understood the direction the growing progressive movement in the late 1890s was setting in motion. Unsound finance can force capital to flee. As a result, who is left to pay the taxes: the working class, who cannot put their labor offshore without migrating?

I have dealt with governments around the world in my 50 years. They are all the same, no matter what they call themselves; there are no mirrors ever in government. We are always the problem. If we all just paid the taxes, they think we are not paying; somehow, their system would work. They never see that they are the instrument of their own decline. It is not IF but WHEN. No government has ever lasted forever.

India was the source of luxury products and spices, along with dyes and silks, that they obtained from China and sold to the Greeks and then the Romans. That’s why Alexander the Great attempted to invade and conquer India, and his troops mutinied, forcing him to abandon the adventure. India produced gold imitations of Roman coins, demonstrating that the value was greater than the gold content. This is why Christopher Columbus set sail, assuming he could find a shorter route to India. When he bumped into a continent in the way, he called the people “Indians.”

Spain became the financial capital of the world after exploiting gold and silver in the New World. They spent more than they had on endless wars, as we have, and Spain defaulted on its national debt many times. 1557, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647. Even in modern times: 1809, 1820, 1831, 1834, 1851, 1867, 1872, 1882, 1936-1939. Even England and France defaulted (see 13th and 14th century Panics).  Financial capital migrated from France to the Netherlands, then to Britain. After World War I, it moved to the United States. Governments NEVER remain on top indefinitely.

The Long-Term Structural Decline

The Soviet command economy was designed for rapid industrialization and military production, but it was fundamentally ill-suited for a modern, consumer-oriented economy. The whole idea of equality eliminated the most critical factor that increased productivity and living standards – human curiosity. By suppressing wealth and stripping it from private ownership, they destroyed the very incentives and innovation that not even AI can replace, for they lack curiosity.

Without market competition or profit motives, enterprises had no incentive to improve efficiency, cut costs, or innovate. The system was rigid, inelastic, and unable to respond to the changing demands of its population or the technological revolution happening in the West. This was because a bureaucrat made the decisions.

Then there was the misallocation of resources. The state directed all investment. This led to a massive, inefficient military-industrial complex that consumed vast resources, while the civilian sector, producing food, clothing, and consumer goods, was neglected and technologically backward.

The famous 1959 display of the modern American kitchen showed that when you followed Marx and saw wealth disparity as evil, the result was not just economic stagnation, but worsening standards of living. Despite being a superpower, the Soviet Union saw its per capita GDP ranking drop from 35th to 47th in the world over the last 30 years of its existence. By the 1980s, it had become a net importer of food, a stark failure for a country with vast agricultural potential.

By the 1980s, everything went from bad to worse. The underlying weaknesses turned into an acute crisis in the 1980s because of several factors that began with the oil price shock of the ’70s. The Soviet economy became dangerously dependent on revenue from oil and gas exports. When global oil prices crashed in the mid-1980s, this vital source of hard currency and budget revenue dried up, exposing the underlying economic foundation that was constructed on Marxist dreams of equality to defeat the business cycle, which proved to be an economic implosion. Europe faces that crisis today, with Germany’s economic growth collapsing to 0.8%.

Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the economy were half-measures that made things worse – Perestroika. The 1987 Law on State Enterprises gave factories more autonomy over wages and investment but did not introduce market pricing or hard budget constraints. This led to a spiral of wage increases without corresponding increases in goods, creating massive shortages and runaway inflation.

The government’s budget deficit exploded to roughly 10-11% of GDP by 1988-1989. The fiscal and monetary systems were collapsing. Because there were no independent central banks or bond markets, the government financed this deficit by printing money. This created a “ruble overhang,” which became a huge amount of cash chasing very few goods. This led to hoarding, especially of food, empty shelves, and the eventual breakdown of the consumer market. The Soviet Union’s collapse was set in motion economically. Nationalism also rose, as in Ukraine, the first to proclaim independence. The central government no longer cared about the people; it focused on retaining power. This eroded its political legitimacy. The West’s attempt, with Maxwell funding the failed August 1991 coup, was also a crucial factor.

However, the economy was the primary structural strain, and we are now suffering in the West for the same reasons, especially in Europe. A system that ignored the people and could not feed its own people, innovate, or manage its finances was not sustainable in the long run. The specific missteps of the Gorbachev era turned a slow, decades-long decline into a terminal crisis, making the collapse from within all but inevitable by 1991.

I have warned that immigration was the final straw that broke the back of the Roman Empire. Roman Emperor Valens (364-378AD) let the Goths enter the Roman Empire, assuming they would defend Rome against the advancing Huns. He trained the Goths in Roman military tactics, and because they were of a completely different culture, as European migrants, they did NOT assimilate into Roman society.  The Goths then turned on the Romans in retaliation, as they were a separate class. Valens met his death on August 9th, 378AD, in one of the greatest military catastrophes ever suffered by the Roman legions, where they were defeated by the very migrants they allowed in at the Battle of Adrianople. Valens body was never found, and the disappearance of an emperor’s body was a profound shock to the empire, leaving his ultimate fate a mystery. This is the risk that Europe faces. They may assume that they can conscript these Muslim imports, but they have no loyalty to Europe, as was the case with the Goths. Europe is in danger of violent internal conflict between cultures.

The traditional date is 476AD, when the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last Western Roman emperor. But that’s misleading—it wasn’t sudden. It was the endpoint of a long unraveling. Between 235 and 285AD, Rome had over 20 emperors in 50 years, most assassinated or killed in civil war. I assembled Rome’s coinage to determine how empires actually die. We all knew Rome fell, but no historian ever looked at this from an economic viewpoint. Was it like a 747 coming in for a landing gradually, or a violent, sudden shock? The latter was the answer. The final fall of the West will be rapid, and 8 years is quite enough.

Czechoslovakia’s peaceful split in 1993, often cited as a model for non-violent state breakup, required two distinct, regionally concentrated nations (Czechs and Slovaks) with clear internal borders and a mutual willingness to separate. The political elites on both sides negotiated the terms of separation.

Based on the available research, a USSR-style collapse of the United States—a sudden, negotiated dissolution of the entire federal union into separate successor states—without a civil war is highly unlikely, though not theoretically impossible. The historical conditions that allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve peacefully are largely absent in the American context, and most scholarly assessments point toward either continued institutional decay or a violent rupture rather than a clean “velvet divorce.”

We show a CONTAGION will seep the world. This will not be a single isolated event. That is the GOOD NEWS. Because this is a CONTAGION, violence should be more at a minimum domestically. The Sovereign Default will undermine the CONFIDENCE in the political state making it more difficult for the government to deploy its armies against the people as we saw with Yeltsin standing on the tanks. The troops were not ready to return to Communism themselves and the coup failed.

The American Civil War was over a religious dispute involving slavery. It was NOT an economic crisis that caused the government to collapse. That is more like we see with Iran vs Israel. The downside will be for those holding government debt. Even in the USA post 1931, since most of Europe and even Canada defaulted on their sovereign debt, foreign debt crisis resulted in the U.S. government creating the Foreign Bondholders Protective Council (FBPC) in 1933 to protect American holders of defaulted foreign bonds and to try to negotiate repayment with foreign governments.

This time, we are looking at a worldwide Sovereign Debt Crisis because everyone borrows with no intention of paying anything off and they assume that this will last forever. That is the risk. Not private assets.

As Edward Gibbon wrote the epitaph of the Roman Empire:

“Her primeval state, such as she -might–appear in a remote age, when Evander entertained the stranger of Troy, has been delineated by the fancy of Virgil. This Tarpeian rock was then a savage and solitary thicket; in the time of the poet, it was crowned with the golden roofs of a temple, the temple is overthrown, the gold has been pillaged, the wheel of Fortune has accomplished her revolution, and the sacred ground is again disfigured with thorns and brambles. The hill of the Capitol, on which we sit, was formerly the head of the Roman Empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings; illustrated by the footsteps of so many triumphs, enriched with the spoils and tributes of so many nations. This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how changed! how defaced! The path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill. Cast your eyes on the Palatine hill, and seek among the shapeless and enormous fragments the marble theatre, the obelisks, the colossal statues, the porticos of Nero’s palace: survey the other hills of the city, the vacant space is interrupted only by ruins and gardens. The forum of the Roman people where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and private edifices that were founded for eternity lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant, and the ruin is the more visible from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.”

Zelensky now says Ukraine needs to mobilize 50,000 to 60,000 people EVERY MONTH simply to keep pace with Russia. Stop for a moment and think about what that number actually means. At 50,000 per month, that is 600,000 people per year. At 60,000, it becomes 720,000. Zelensky is talking about finding a population roughly equivalent to a substantial European city every single year to feed into a war that has already been grinding on since 2022. Where are these people supposed to come from?

That is the question nobody wants to confront because Ukraine does not possess an unlimited reservoir of military-age men. Its population was already declining before the war. Millions of Ukrainians subsequently fled abroad, millions more live in Russian-occupied territory, and the remaining population has endured years of casualties, disability, displacement, emigration, and demographic collapse. Ukraine does not publish a complete current population count because there has been no census since 2001 and wartime migration makes estimates difficult.

Ukraine has already been forced to expand the recruitment pool. The minimum mobilization age was lowered from 27 to 25 in 2024. Men between 18 and 60 generally remain subject to wartime restrictions on leaving the country, although there are exemptions, and Kyiv has repeatedly revised mobilization procedures as the military searches for additional manpower. Rumor has it that they will start going after the young women next. Ukraine has resisted lowering compulsory mobilization to 18, instead creating voluntary contracts with enhanced financial incentives for people aged 18 to 24. I’d expect that to change as well.

A 20-year-old is not merely another soldier on a spreadsheet. He is potentially forty or fifty years of future productive labor. He is a future engineer, farmer, mechanic, entrepreneur, taxpayer, husband, and father. Kill or permanently disable enough young men and the economic consequences continue for generations after the politicians finally sign whatever peace agreement they could have negotiated years earlier.

Human capital is much harder to measure. How do you calculate the children who will never be born because their prospective fathers died at 23? How do you calculate the businesses never created, the taxes never paid, the families never formed, or the skilled workers who fled the country rather than risk being mobilized?

Ukraine already entered this war with one of Europe’s worst demographic problems. Its fertility rate had been well below replacement for years, and the war drove births still lower. That means the generation Kyiv is drawing upon today was already smaller than the generations that preceded it. You cannot manufacture another generation of 25-year-olds because the Defense Ministry needs another 50,000 recruits next month.

Then there is the issue everyone conveniently ignores when quoting mobilization figures: recruitment is not the same thing as increasing the size of the army. If Ukraine mobilizes 50,000 people while thousands of existing soldiers are killed, wounded, medically discharged, missing, deserting, or otherwise leaving service, the net increase is far smaller. They are replacing men the war has already consumed rather than expanding the military.

Russia faces the same brutal arithmetic, but Russia began with a population several times larger than Ukraine’s. Ukraine cannot simply compete with Russia soldier-for-soldier indefinitely and pretend demographics do not exist. If Moscow can recruit or mobilize from a vastly larger population, matching Russia’s monthly manpower numbers becomes increasingly expensive for Ukraine in demographic terms.

The people cheering for endless war from Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, and Berlin do not have to supply 60,000 Ukrainians every month. They supply money. They supply artillery shells. They supply missiles. They supply loans and weapons contracts. Ukraine supplies the human beings.

That is why Zelensky’s 50,000 to 60,000 figure should horrify anyone actually concerned about Ukraine’s future rather than merely its battlefield position next month. Annualize the upper end and Kyiv is talking about mobilizing 720,000 people every year merely to match what it says Russia is recruiting. That does not mean 720,000 will necessarily be mobilized or sent into combat, nor does it tell us Ukraine’s casualty total. But the scale of the stated requirement exposes the fundamental problem.

Ukraine cannot continue burning through its human capital indefinitely. Neither can Russia. There is no victory worth celebrating if, by the time politicians finally decide to negotiate, an entire generation has been buried, crippled, displaced, or driven overseas and the country supposedly being saved no longer has enough young people left to rebuild it. The weapons can eventually be replaced. The buildings can eventually be reconstructed. The debt can be rolled over and politicians will pretend somebody else will pay it later. The young men disappearing into this war cannot be printed, borrowed, or replaced.

Switzerland built its reputation over generations on one simple principle: NEUTRALITY. It survived two world wars without joining either side, became a diplomatic meeting ground precisely because it was outside the military alliances surrounding it, and turned that independence into an enormous economic advantage. Capital trusted Switzerland because Switzerland was supposed to stay out of everyone else’s wars. Now even that definition is changing.

Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected an initiative that would have written a much stricter form of neutrality into the constitution. The proposal was defeated by 70.15% to 29.85%, with every single district voting against it and turnout at 47.06%. The initiative would have prohibited Switzerland from cooperating with military or defense alliances unless Switzerland itself faced an attack or an imminent attack, and it would have prevented Bern from imposing sanctions on belligerent nations unless the United Nations had approved those sanctions.

The Swiss government opposed the proposal because it wanted to preserve the freedom to cooperate with other countries on security and to impose sanctions independently. Switzerland is not joining NATO because of this vote, nor did voters formally abolish neutrality. In fact, polling still shows overwhelming public support for remaining neutral. What they rejected was a much more rigid constitutional definition of what neutrality must mean.

How neutral can a nation become before the word itself begins to lose its meaning? After the war began, Switzerland largely adopted the European Union’s sanctions against Moscow. Bern has continued aligning itself with subsequent sanctions packages, including measures targeting Russian energy, banking, and the military-industrial sector. Switzerland has also cooperated with NATO for decades through the Partnership for Peace and joint activities, while its defense minister has argued for deeper security cooperation as Europe responds to the war in Ukraine.

Supporters of the defeated initiative argued that this is precisely how neutrality disappears. It does not vanish one morning when somebody lowers the Swiss flag and raises a NATO flag. It erodes incrementally.

Opponents made the opposite argument. They said rigid neutrality would tie Switzerland’s hands, prevent it from responding economically to violations of international law, and weaken its ability to cooperate with European partners on security. That is the choice Swiss voters were actually making, and they overwhelmingly decided that neutrality should not prevent their government from using sanctions or cooperating with NATO.

Fine. That is democracy. The Swiss people voted and the result could hardly have been clearer. But there is an economic issue here that goes far beyond Russia and Ukraine. Switzerland’s neutrality was never merely some romantic political tradition. It became part of the country’s financial architecture. Neutrality helped make Switzerland a place where competing governments, businesses, and private capital could operate precisely because the country was perceived as standing apart from geopolitical conflicts. That reputation helped build Geneva as a diplomatic center and Switzerland as one of the world’s great financial centers.

Once you begin weaponizing finance, sanctions, reserves, and access to markets, capital starts examining political risk differently. This is what governments repeatedly fail to understand. Money does not care about speeches on morality. Capital asks whether the rules will remain the same tomorrow.

The seizure and freezing of Russian assets throughout the West changed the calculation for governments everywhere. Whatever one thinks about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and every other holder of substantial foreign reserves watched what happened. They learned that financial assets can become geopolitical weapons when relations deteriorate. That lesson does not disappear because Western governments believe their cause is justified.

This is also part of a much larger transformation taking place across Europe. Germany is rebuilding its military and debating compulsory service. France has introduced a new voluntary national-service program as its military leadership warns the public about potential sacrifices in a confrontation with Russia. NATO members are dramatically increasing defense spending. The European Union is building an increasingly integrated defense industry. Even traditionally neutral states are reconsidering what neutrality means in an environment dominated by the Ukraine war.

Finland and Sweden have already abandoned military nonalignment and joined NATO. Austria remains formally neutral but participates in EU sanctions against Russia. Ireland is debating its own security posture. Switzerland remains militarily neutral, but the political distance between neutral Europe and NATO Europe has unquestionably narrowed.

This is how political systems change. Rarely does everything happen at once. Each decision is presented as a limited response to the crisis immediately in front of you. Governments insist nothing fundamental has changed because technically the old policy still exists. Then one day you look back and discover that the institution bearing the old name no longer resembles what previous generations understood it to mean.

The Swiss people have every right to redefine neutrality however they choose. That is one of the virtues of Switzerland’s direct democracy. Unlike Brussels, where bureaucrats make decisions several layers removed from voters, the Swiss actually put the question before their citizens. They voted overwhelmingly against locking the older definition into the constitution. But markets will make their own judgment as well.

There is one economic indicator governments consistently underestimate because they cannot control it with legislation or manipulate it with an interest-rate announcement: confidence. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index collapsed 6.7 points in September to 81.9, the lowest reading since April 2014. Economists expected 89.2. This was not some marginal statistical miss. Americans are becoming increasingly pessimistic about their jobs, their purchasing power, and what they see coming over the next six months.

This is how an economy changes direction. People do not wake up one morning because the government announces a recession and suddenly stop spending. They begin changing behavior long before the official statistics catch up. They cancel the vacation, stop eating out as often, hold off on that new car purchase, and begin putting whatever they can aside because they no longer TRUST what tomorrow will bring. That change in confidence then becomes economic reality because consumer spending is the backbone of the American economy.

The Conference Board’s Present Situation Index dropped 7.9 points to 109.3, while its Expectations Index fell another 5.9 points to just 63.6, the third consecutive monthly decline. The Expectations Index is particularly important because people are telling you what they THINK is coming. Confidence is not merely about whether somebody has a job today. It is whether that person believes the job will still exist six months from now.

That confidence in employment is clearly deteriorating. Only 23.6% of consumers now say jobs are “plentiful,” the lowest since February 2021. The share saying jobs are “hard to get” increased to 21.9%, the highest since January 2021. The gap between those two measures has collapsed to just 1.7 percentage points from 4.2 points in August. That labor-market differential has historically moved with unemployment, and consumers are clearly sensing weakness beneath the surface.

The government’s own job-opening data confirms that something is changing. Open positions fell by 256,000 in August to 7.079 million. There are now roughly 1.01 job openings for every unemployed person, compared with nearly two openings for every unemployed worker during the frenzy of 2022. Professional and business services lost 119,000 openings while healthcare and social assistance lost another 115,000. Construction, manufacturing, and government openings also declined. People feel these changes before economists sitting behind computers recognize them.

At the same time, the cost of living refuses to cooperate. Consumers told the Conference Board that references to prices, goods and services, and particularly oil and gasoline had risen to new highs. The University of Michigan’s separate survey tells essentially the same story. Its September Consumer Sentiment Index fell to 48.1, down 15% since January, while consumers’ one-year inflation expectations have risen to 4.6%. Views of both current and future personal finances deteriorated sharply.

This is precisely why confidence matters more than politicians understand. Inflation does not have to continue rising at 8% or 9% for people to remain angry. Prices NEVER went back to where they were before the COVID inflation. The rate of increase may slow, but the accumulated increase remains. A family paying substantially more for groceries, insurance, electricity, gasoline, housing, and automobiles does not care that some economist announces inflation has moderated. Now add interest rates.

The Federal Reserve raised rates this month for the first time in three years, taking the federal funds target to 3.75%-4.00%, because renewed inflation pressure has left policymakers with little choice. Meanwhile, the average 30-year mortgage has climbed above 7%. A young couple trying to purchase their first house is being crushed from both directions. The house itself costs more and the money required to buy it costs more.

Americans are becoming less willing to voluntarily leave their jobs. That is not necessarily a sign of a healthy labor market. During periods of strong confidence, workers quit because they believe they can find something better. When people become frightened, they cling to whatever employment they already have.

The stock market can make new highs while Main Street confidence collapses. There is nothing contradictory about that. Capital moves internationally and increasingly concentrates into assets when people lose confidence in governments, currencies, banks, or alternative investments. The Dow is not a national opinion poll. A rising stock market does not automatically mean the average household believes the economy is doing well.

Confidence is the foundation of every monetary and political system. A dollar is worth something because people have confidence somebody else will accept it tomorrow. A Treasury bond has value because investors have confidence the government will honor the obligation. A bank functions because depositors have confidence their money will be there when they ask for it. An economy expands because consumers and businesses have confidence that taking risks today will produce rewards tomorrow.

Once confidence begins to crack, governments cannot simply order it back. The September data is therefore more important than another monthly economic statistic buried in a government report. Americans across political affiliations, income groups, and age groups are becoming more pessimistic if not outright worried.

Confidence turns BEFORE the economy because the economy is nothing more than the collective decisions of human beings. Governments can manipulate interest rates, create money, borrow trillions, subsidize industries, and produce whatever economic forecast they please. What they cannot command is confidence. Once the public stops believing tomorrow will be better than today, their behavior changes, and eventually the statistics have no choice but to follow.

As I have noted before, the Roman historian Sallust concluded that the decline of the Roman Republic truly began once Rome had eliminated its external enemies—Carthage, Corinth, and Macedonia among them. With no foreign foe left to unite against, the Romans turned inward and tore themselves apart in bitter factional strife. That observation applies with striking force to our present political crisis. The United States, Europe, Canada, and parts of Asia and the Middle East have fractured into Left versus Right, and no shared sense of unity remains—no loyalty to country or people that transcends the divide. Each side wages war to destroy the opponent it despises. Unfortunately, this is our fate, and we must recognize it as it unfolds on the road to 2032. For now, the next two years threaten to become a living hell, with no one left to defend the country or its people. While others offer personal opinions, I do not have that luxury. My job is to relay what the computer is projecting.

The overwhelming downside of a Democratic victory is that they are the pro-war party. A Gallup poll from last April showed that only 19% of Democrats were optimistic about a possible peace deal. As I have said before, it is almost always the Democratic Party that takes us into war. Wilson led us into World War I. FDR led us into World War II. Truman nuked Japan and took us into Korea. Johnson took us into Vietnam. Dick Cheney usurped foreign policy and took us into Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama tried to take us into Syria, while Hillary Clinton oversaw the gun-running neoconservative operation in Benghazi.

Look, for decades I have warn governments that this current system will collapse and a 2-year-old with a pocket calculator can figure that one out. For fiscal year 1980, the gross interest cost on the national debt was $74.8 billion. To put that in context, the total national debt at that time was roughly $715 billion and everyone was freaking out that it was going to hit $1 trillion.

Projections for fiscal year 2026 indicate net interest payments will reach approximately $1.0 trillion. Some data from the first nine months of the fiscal year shows net interest payments already totaled  $827 billion on a $40 trillion national debt.

Interest expenditures on U.S. national debt first exceeded military spending in 2024. The Net Interest Payments was $879.9 billion compared to National Defense Spending $850.7 billion.

It’s not rocket science – just math. What happens is that interest expenditure keep rising because they only roll the debt and NEVER pay it off. Eventually, the interest expenditures crowd out all other spending. We reach the 50% level of the national debt was accumulative interest expenditures in 2024. This will not end nicely!!!!!

The Democrats will completely destroy the United States by 2032, and it is going to get ugly from 2028 onward. Why? I am not being partisan here, because the Republicans will not touch real reform either, fearing the people are not ready to make sacrifices. Consider Elizabeth Warren, who is determined to transform the United States into a socialist republic. She is obsessed with robbing the rich—whom she defines as anyone with more millions than she has—as if this is some kind of solution. It is just a band-aid on a bullet hole.

As reported, in a post on X Wednesday, Warren compared workers earning $60,000 and $184,500 with someone earning $10 million, saying the first two pay Social Security taxes on all their earnings while the higher earner pays the tax only on the first $184,500. “That doesn’t make sense,” Warren wrote. “We can protect Social Security if everyone paid their fair share.” Yet that contradicts what Social Security was supposed to be.

Social Security was sold to the American public as a “contribution” to present the program as social insurance, but the Supreme Court upheld it as a tax, and it was always collected through the IRS. The cap exists because Social Security was designed as a social insurance program, not a general welfare or savings account. Warren now wants to alter Social Security and transform it into a welfare benefit that will take care of all the illegal immigrants they protect to boost their voting rolls.

There is zero understanding of the world economy. Even with inflation, people see the price, assume the price is the problem, and propose regulation—but the price is simply the message. You have not just the Middle East, with the Strait controlled by Iran, but the Houthis determined to cripple Saudi Arabia. Throw in Zelensky, and our computer warns that crude oil could reach as high as $234 by 2028—especially if the EU and NATO end up going to war with Russia. That would probably lead to the merger of the Middle East conflict with the Ukraine War and draw in China and North Korea. We have support at $80, with resistance at $125 and $188. A year-end 2026 close above $111 will be a message we should not ignore.

Letting migrants into Europe, the United States, and Canada has been a LEFT agenda to retain power—knowing full well that their policies lower economic growth and reduce living standards. Economic growth in Germany has collapsed to 0.8%, and Italy is down to 0.5%. I first encountered this plot when I had a mandate from Hong Kong to negotiate with Australia to buy an island or allow Hong Kong residents to migrate and build their own city in the upper-left region of Australia. The 99-year lease of Hong Kong to the British expired on June 30, 1997, which was when the handover ceremony took place.

They knew I had contacts in Australia and asked me to try to strike a deal. I met with former Prime Minister Paul Keating. Everything I offered was rejected. I told him I had a blank check to pay off their national debt, but the answer was still no. I finally asked him directly if this was racism—was it because they did not like Chinese people? He said no. They were fleeing communism and would vote conservative. Keating led a Labour government. Allowing Hong Kong residents to migrate to Australia would have altered their politics.

They understand this very well. Opening the borders has been about their knowledge that the LEFT has been losing ground and was destined to collapse. Look at this chart. Measuring the Democrats’ total number of seats by combining the Senate and House reveals the long-term trend. The Democrats held their highest percentage back in the early 19th century. Each subsequent high thereafter has been lower. Since FDR and the Great Depression, each rally has produced a declining number of seats. This is what the whole opening of the borders has been about—a desperate attempt to fight the trend and retain power, like Merz in Germany, who refuses to admit the people do not approve of his policies. It is never about the people or what is best for the country. It is always about forcing their ideas upon society.

Politics in Europe, as well as in Canada and the United States, has degenerated into war. It is no longer about compromise, the nation, or the people. They look down upon the people as too stupid to know what is best. This is exactly what Sallust described about the fall of the Roman Republic. The two sides are so far apart that there is simply no mending this political crisis. We are forced to watch it play out, and we cannot simply change the channel.

NEVER are they willing to look at history. And you do not even have to go back that far. Just look at the City of Detroit. They did the same thing as Mamdani in NYC. They exploited the auto industry to the point that all the car companies left town and Detroit went bust in 1933. Mamdani is doing it all over again. He is chasing Wall Street out. The Texas Exchange will reduce the NYSE. Even JPMorgan now has more employees outside of NYC than inside.

NYC was once the largest port in the United States. The labor unions were uncompromising and hostile. The companies left town, and nobody docks in NYC anymore. No matter what you show them, they refuse to listen.

I find it interesting that there was even a communist state in Sparta, Greece. They were the only Greek city that never issued coins, because you were effectively an economic slave to the state, barred from accumulating wealth. Maybe AOC and Elizabeth Warren were married to Mamdani in ancient Sparta in another life. It is fascinating that their philosophy of always coveting their neighbor’s wealth is expressly forbidden in the Ten Commandments. That demonstrates there is this dark side to humanity that has been around for thousands of years.

We have incompetent people in government everywhere. While individuals learn from past mistakes in most cases, governments have no cumulative knowledge. Hence, they make the same mistakes from one generation to the next. There is no collective societal knowledge base. Thus, we are living in Groundhog Day, with the same crazy mistakes being made over and over and over again, incapable of breaking this vicious cycle.

I have warned that the computer has been projecting that 2028 will be sheer political chaos. Between now and then, we are in an unrelenting war cycle that turned up in 2014 and is escalating into 2027 from every direction. There is no sanity left anywhere. The Middle East has no resolution, for this is a religious war with each side looking to fulfill prophecy. Ukraine is consumed with sheer hatred that prevents any reasonable solution. Europe needs war because its climate change policies destroyed the German economy, and on top of that, they opened the borders and flooded the country, altering its culture forever. As tensions rise, following Sallust, they desperately need an external enemy to create unity and retain power in Brussels. The Democrats are so pro-war that they will seize power and fund Ukraine to utter destruction.

Congressional investigations will happen on an unprecedented scale, even for Washington. The Democrats are going to focus on 2028, and the best way to take over the country will be to expose the Trump Administration as rotten to the core. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has already said they would immediately focus on “corruption.” Jim Himes (D., Conn.) has expressed the same attitude, calling it “nakedly corrupt dealings” between the Trump administration and companies. My concerns are not so much about that, because the Democrats pander to corporations for big bucks as well. My concern is the President’s son-in-law, Kushner, who is NOT an actual government employee; he and his sidekick are “volunteers,” and this structure is meant to avoid FOIA filings, as Hillary did with her private server. If I were them, I would prepare to be torn apart limb from limb.

As we head into 2028, there will certainly be no shortage of Democratic candidates, ranging from governors and members of Congress to outsiders with thick skin. Democrats have desperately, as a whole, tried to navigate this midterm election without really confronting the differences between their Democratic Socialists of America flank and the more practical center of the party. This is what we should expect to see in the headlines as we head into 2028.

Capital flows are shifting as money moves from PUBLIC to PRIVATE. Bond markets globally are in crisis, for as you beat the war drums, debt rises and the loser always defaults. I have warned that we are in a PRIVATE WAVE that concludes with a peak in 2032. This is when capital shifts from government bonds to private assets. We are in the EVERYTHING BUBBLE, where stocks, real estate, art, gold, silver, and commodities in general tend to be tangible assets to which capital will flee. Others are starting to notice this trend.

When we do this year’s WEC in December 4, 5, and 6, we will have a lot to discuss. This is the only way to surve such a wave and we are in the final stages. What to avoid, and where to go.

There is something deeply disturbing taking place in Europe. The generation that remembers war only through documentaries is increasingly willing to tell the generation that would actually have to fight one that military service should become compulsory. France provides perhaps the clearest example. An IFOP survey found that 64% of French respondents supported compulsory military service for people between 18 and 25. But look beneath that number and everything changes. Among the 18-to-24-year-olds who would actually be affected, support was only 40%. Among those aged 50 to 64, it soared to 80%. Among people 65 and older, 71% supported it. It is always easier to demand sacrifice when somebody else’s body will be making it.

France abolished compulsory military service decades ago, but military service is creeping back into the political conversation as Europe prepares for the possibility of a prolonged confrontation with Russia. Macron has now launched a voluntary national service program beginning with 3,000 young people, with plans to expand it to 10,000 annually and potentially 50,000 by 2035. They receive military training and €800 per month, and the government insists the present program is voluntary and that these recruits are not intended to be deployed abroad.

France’s armed forces chief, General Fabien Mandon, caused an uproar when he said the country needed the strength to “accept losing its children” if it was going to deter Russia. How could any mother or father sacrifice their child to an endless war? What will these neocons do to brainwash the public into believing this sacrifice must take place?

For years, European leaders told younger generations that nationalism was antiquated, borders mattered less, Europe had moved beyond war, and economic integration would make the conflicts of the twentieth century impossible. Now those same institutions are rediscovering patriotism because they need soldiers. Suddenly the nation matters again when governments need an 18-year-old to defend it.

At the same time, what exactly has this generation inherited from their lovely government? Housing has become increasingly unaffordable. Government debt continues climbing. Taxes consume enormous portions of income. Pension systems are strained by aging populations, and younger workers are expected to finance benefits for generations far larger than their own. Now the same political establishment wants them to shoulder Europe’s military burden as well. Governments spent decades borrowing against the future, and the young were already going to inherit that debt. Apparently, that was not enough.

This is precisely where Europe’s demographic crisis collides with its military ambitions. France, Germany, Italy, and much of Europe are aging. Governments need young people working, paying taxes, producing goods, starting businesses, having children, supporting pension systems, and maintaining the productive economy. Now they also want a larger pool of soldiers and reservists. You cannot keep demanding more from a shrinking generation without eventually discovering that there are not enough young people to satisfy every promise politicians made before they were born.

The numbers reveal the contradiction better than any politician ever could. Only 40% of those aged 18 to 24 in the IFOP survey supported compulsory service for their age group, while support reached 80% among those aged 50 to 64. The people most enthusiastic about compelling the young to serve are therefore not the people who would be fleeing a drone strike far away from home.

There is something profoundly wrong when the older generations sit comfortably at home discussing the necessity of sacrifice while debating whether the young should once again be prepared for the trenches. If France itself were attacked, young French men and women would have to decide what defending their country means to them, and polling suggests many would indeed be prepared to serve. But demanding compulsory service for somebody else’s generation is not sacrifice. Sacrifice is what you are willing to give yourself. Sending somebody else’s son or daughter to pay the price for your geopolitical decisions is something entirely different.