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.

France is burning again, and at some point we have to stop pretending this is normal. As many as 500 high schools are closed or partially closed because the government cannot guarantee their security. Twenty-four schools have reportedly been burned or ransacked and 78 education employees injured. In Paris, hooded individuals piled combustible material against the entrance of a school and set it on fire. When masked thugs are setting schools on fire, you are watching the breakdown of civil society.

The radical left has helped turn legitimate frustration into another excuse for confrontation with the state. What began with complaints about teachers and education spread through disadvantaged Paris suburbs before exploding into a nationwide movement, with authorities saying violent groups infiltrated demonstrations. This is the same political sickness we keep seeing across Europe: every grievance becomes justification for occupying something, smashing something, burning something, or attacking the police, while politicians are terrified to call it what it is because they have spent years romanticizing radicalism whenever it serves their political interests.

Then there is the immigration crisis that the French establishment has spent decades refusing to discuss honestly. France permitted large-scale immigration while failing miserably at integration in parts of the country. It allowed segregated suburbs to develop where poverty, unemployment, crime, alienation and distrust of the state became entrenched across generations. Immigration does not make someone violent, and the government has not established that migrants are responsible for all these attacks, but denying the enormous integration crisis surrounding many French banlieues has become absurd. You cannot import people indefinitely without ensuring they become part of the society they are entering and then act surprised when parallel communities emerge.

France has already seen where this road leads. The 2005 riots spread across the country as thousands of vehicles were burned and public buildings attacked. The 2023 riots produced another wave of arson, looting and destruction after the police killing of Nahel Merzouk. Now we are watching schools burned and hundreds more closed because authorities fear additional violence. How many times does the same country have to erupt before politicians admit there is a structural problem?

France is also running directly into the financial wall. The country has one of Europe’s largest welfare states, persistent deficits, enormous public debt, and rising borrowing costs. Yet every social failure produces demands for still more government spending. More teachers, more housing, more welfare, more policing, more subsidies, more integration programs and more reconstruction after the next riot. Nobody ever asks where the money comes from because the political class has spent generations pretending debt is free.

This is where uncontrolled immigration and sovereign debt eventually collide. Every additional person requires housing, schools, healthcare, transportation and infrastructure. A successful immigration policy expands the productive economy alongside the population and integrates newcomers into the nation. A failed policy increases demands on systems that are already strained while refusing to acknowledge capacity limits. France chose ideology over arithmetic and is now discovering that calling critics names does not create another classroom, apartment or hospital bed.

The radical left will blame capitalism, inequality, the police, austerity or whatever slogan is fashionable this week, but burning schools will not produce another teacher. Destroying public property will not improve education. Setting fire to the institutions your own community depends upon is not resistance. It is self-destruction.

Now children cannot even go to school because these idiots think they have some God given right to burn, smash and destroy an entire community whenever they are angry. They torch a school, destroy a bus stop, smash a storefront or burn somebody’s car and somehow imagine they have punished “the government.” The government does not reach into its own pocket and clean up the mess. The TAXPAYER does. The shopkeeper whose windows were smashed pays. The worker whose car was burned pays. The parents whose children are sitting at home because their school is closed pay. Then the same fools who destroyed their own neighborhoods complain that there are not enough teachers, services, or opportunities, as if money magically falls from the sky to rebuild everything they just burned. This is not protest and it is not some noble rebellion against the system. It is sheer stupidity, and the innocent people trying to work, raise families and send their children to school are being forced to pay for it.

Chile is back in the streets, and this is how it always begins. More than 20,000 students, teachers, workers and union members marched through Santiago against President José Antonio Kast’s 2027 budget. Then came the rocks, bottles, tear gas, arrests, and water cannons. Everyone will argue about who threw what first and whether the police overreacted, but they are missing the point. The government created a system of promises, the economy can no longer comfortably carry all of them, and now people are furious because politicians suddenly discovered arithmetic.

Chile’s unemployment rate is already 9.6%, and Kast came into office promising to cut the fat from government. His proposed budget increases overall spending by only 1.5%, the smallest expansion in two decades outside the post-COVID adjustment. His government reviewed 632 programs across 23 ministries and effectively asked a question that should have been asked decades ago: what are taxpayers actually getting for this money? Naturally, everyone receiving the money suddenly believes civilization will collapse if they remove one peso.

This is the insanity of government. Politicians create programs when times are good because buying votes with somebody else’s money is the easiest profession on earth. They hand out benefits, subsidies and promises without ever asking how they will be financed 10 or 20 years later. Eventually those temporary political gifts become permanent RIGHTS. Then somebody finally looks at the books and realizes the numbers do not work, and suddenly there are 20,000 people marching through the capital demanding that the money continue flowing.

Kast has already backed away from some of the reductions and insists free higher education for more than 600,000 students will remain. The government says the structural education budget is not being destroyed. It almost does not matter anymore because confidence is the real issue. The students do not trust the government, the government does not trust the previous spending structure, and everybody believes somebody else should pay the bill.

Chile should know where this road leads because it lived through 2019. That explosion supposedly began over a small increase in Santiago metro fares. It was never really about the metro fare. That was merely the match tossed onto years of accumulated frustration over pensions, wages, education, inequality, and the cost of living. Once the psychology changed, people were not arguing about thirty pesos anymore. They were burning metro stations.

This is what the academics never understand about civil unrest. They sit there looking for some neat mathematical explanation after everything is already on fire. People tolerate deteriorating conditions for years until suddenly they don’t. One tax, one price increase, one spending cut, one police incident or one stupid statement from some politician becomes the spark, and everyone acts surprised when decades of resentment explode at once.

Politicians created this mess because they NEVER tell people the truth when they make these promises. They do not say, “We can give you this benefit today, but there may not be enough money to maintain it forever.” They pretend government possesses some magical bottomless bank account. Then the economy turns, unemployment rises, tax revenues disappoint, debt costs increase, and suddenly the same government tells everyone sacrifices must be made.

Sacrifices by whom?

Certainly not the political class. The people are always told they must accept less, pay more taxes, retire later, surrender another subsidy, or watch another public service deteriorate. That is when confidence begins to crack because people realize government spent the money years ago and left them with the bill.

The civil unrest we are seeing around the world is not occurring in a vacuum. Governments are running into fiscal constraints at precisely the same time younger generations are struggling with housing, employment and the cost of living. These people are being handed debts they did not create and promises governments can no longer afford to honor.

The Economic Confidence Model is about precisely this transition in human behavior. Civil unrest does not begin because somebody publishes a bad GDP number. It begins when enough people finally conclude that the people running the system have absolutely no idea what they are doing. Once that confidence breaks, every tax increase, spending cut and political decision becomes another potential match.

Chile is back in the streets because government once again made promises without considering tomorrow. Now tomorrow has arrived, the arithmetic no longer works, and politicians are discovering that taking away what government once handed out is far more dangerous than giving it away in the first place. This is how political systems begin to fracture, not because everyone suddenly becomes a revolutionary, but because the people finally realize the promises were written by politicians who never intended to be around when the bill came due.

QUESTION: I just watched Genius on Albert Einstein. Beyond the fact that I can see why people compare you to him—driven by your research and curiosity rather than money, which is also why you don’t sell advertising or flood inboxes with 50 solicitation emails a day—what also struck me was how obsessed J. Edgar Hoover was with bringing Einstein down. He even carried out illegal searches and used what he found to manipulate both judges and the press against him. They manipulated the press during COVID too. Is there any way to ever get an honest government?

KL

ANSWER: Historians and researchers who have examined the declassified FBI files describe J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign against Albert Einstein as a personal vendetta or a “secret war” fueled by ideological suspicion. While there’s no evidence of a personal slight between the two men, Hoover’s deep distrust of Einstein’s politics drove a two-decade effort to discredit him.

Hoover used the FBI for his personal para noia. He maintained a massive file on Einstein from his arrival in the U.S. in 1933 until his death in 1955, eventually reaching over 1,400 pages. Hoover personally ordered investigations and the Bureau employed aggressive tactics, including tapping his phone, opening his mail, and searching his trash.

Hoover’s obsession was rooted in Einstein’s outspoken activism against war, not just his science. The FBI director labeled him an “extreme radical” and Hoover suspected him of being a communist or even a Soviet spy as he also maintained files of just about every member of Congress and presidents. This suspicion was driven by Einstein’s public stances against racism, nationalism, and nuclear weapons, as well as his friendships with controversial figures like Paul Robeson.

Hoover was desperate to deport or discredit him. Hoover’s personal war against Einstein was extremely intense and was revealed by its objectives. Hoover tried for years to link Einstein to a Soviet espionage ring, hoping to have him arrested or deported. In 1950, he launched an intensified effort to gather “derogatory information” specifically to discredit Einstein at all costs where he acted no different than a communist state he pretended to hate so much. Hoover ignored all rights of Einstein and ignored all constitution restraints on his power.

The allegations the Hoover pursued were often absurd, including claims that Einstein was plotting to kidnap the Lindbergh baby, had invented a “death ray,” or was the mastermind of a Communist plot to take over Hollywood. Ultimately, Hoover failed to prove any of these claims or limit Einstein’s public influence during his lifetime.

I was personally told years ago by member of Congress that he would assemble a file on a politician, walk into his office, say this is what they found, your opponent could use this. He would claim to bury it and then you owed him a favor.

This is the prosecutor I faced who kept me in contempt desperate to find anything. They knew I advised on many takeovers and investigated even my family assuming I had to have some hidden account somewhere for inside trading. His #2, Brian Code, wanted to go after the bank, but someone did not let him. He told my lawyer “we know he didn’t take anything.” At that reverse proffer, Owens told me he would not drop any changes, and just said you are “one smart” SOB because they could find anything.

They never got it. When you have offices arpund the world, you have to comply with the laws around the world. The lawyer said plainly, the only way I could possibly comply worldwide was I could not even have a stock account. I was paid big bucks BECAUSE I had no conflict of interest. People in such positions seem to have to assume everyone is guilty and rotten to the core just so they can look at themselves in the mirror and pretend they are defending society. I have seen this pattern not just in my case, but so many.

There should be an independent panel of PRIVATE lawyers that rotate. No indictment should ever be allowed to be the product of a single prosecutor. Their personal ego and career get wrapped up it. They all look to take down a famous person like Rudy Guiliani took down John Gotti of the NY Mafia and used that to become Mayor. Just look at how many politicians were former prosecutors right down to Christopher James Christie the governor of New Jersey.  Until the authority to craft a charge against anyone is put before an independent panel, there will never be true honest government.

The Rule of Law is everything. Without it, there can be no investment and no economy.

We have to start there or all is lost.

Economists keep pointing to consumer spending as proof that the American economy remains strong. Americans spent 0.9% more in August, and naturally this is being celebrated as the resilient American consumer. But real disposable income did not increase AT ALL, while the personal savings rate fell to just 4.1%. Americans are spending more while their inflation-adjusted income is going nowhere and savings are being depleted to maintain their standard of living.

The cost-of-living crisis is showing up in the numbers. Consumer spending can rise during inflation simply because everything costs more. If your grocery bill rises from $150 to $200, you increased consumer spending by 33%, but you did not become wealthier or eat 33% more food. You simply handed over more dollars for the same necessities.

Personal consumption expenditures increased by $190.8 billion in August while personal income increased only $66.6 billion. Real consumer spending rose 0.6%, but real disposable income was flat. You can maintain that imbalance temporarily by reducing savings or borrowing, but you cannot maintain it forever.

This is what Washington never understands about inflation. They tell people inflation has fallen because the RATE of increase is lower than it was at the peak. That does not mean prices went back down. Consumer prices are roughly 30% higher than at the end of 2019. Something that cost $100 then costs roughly $130 today. Lower inflation merely means prices are rising more slowly from an already elevated level.

This is why consumer confidence can collapse while spending remains strong. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index plunged to 81.9 in September, its lowest reading since 2014. The University of Michigan’s sentiment index fell to 48.1 and is now 15% below January. People are continuing to spend because they must continue living, but they are increasingly worried about what comes next.

The University of Michigan reports that consumers’ expectations for inflation over the next year climbed to 4.6% in September, up from 3.4% in February. Consumers’ assessments of both their current and expected personal finances also deteriorated. The paycheck may still be coming in, but it simply does not stretch as far as it once did. Americans feel the conditions of the economy daily.

Even if inflation fell to 2% tomorrow, today’s elevated price level would remain. Prices would simply continue increasing from that higher base. This is how inflation quietly destroys the middle class. Savings decline, debt rises, homeownership becomes harder, young people delay families, and retirees discover that their savings purchase far less than expected.

The American consumer has kept this economy moving, but there is a limit to how long households can spend faster than their real incomes grow. You cannot raid savings forever, increase credit-card balances forever, or finance your standard of living indefinitely.

Strong consumer spending therefore does not necessarily mean the consumer is strong. Sometimes it means the consumer is paying substantially more simply to remain in the same place. Americans are still spending, but real disposable income has stalled, savings are falling, confidence has collapsed, and prices remain roughly 30% above where they stood before the pandemic-era inflation surge. Washington can call that resilience if it wants, but ordinary people know the difference between spending more because they are becoming wealthier and spending more because life itself has become more expensive.

The September jobs report should put an end to the fantasy that the American economy can absorb rising prices indefinitely without eventually hitting employment. The economy added only 29,000 jobs when economists expected roughly 84,000, while unemployment increased to 4.2%. Worse still, July was revised from a gain of 21,000 jobs to a LOSS of 10,000, and August was revised down from 162,000 to 133,000. Those revisions erased another 60,000 jobs from what we were previously told was a stronger labor market.

This is the stagflationary squeeze I have been talking about. Prices remain elevated while economic growth and employment begin to weaken. Average hourly earnings increased only 0.1% in September and 3.0% over the past year. Consumer inflation has been running above that pace, meaning workers can receive a nominal raise while still losing purchasing power. You can have a job, earn more dollars, and still become poorer in real terms.

The labor market is not collapsing, and that distinction matters. Initial unemployment claims remain low and the unemployment rate has stayed between 4.1% and 4.3% since March. But the direction underneath the headline is deteriorating. There are now 7.1 million unemployed Americans, 1.9 million have been unemployed for at least 27 weeks, and 4.5 million are working part-time for economic reasons because they cannot find full-time work or their hours have been reduced.

This is precisely the environment that traps the Federal Reserve. Raise rates to fight inflation and you place additional pressure on employment, housing, business investment, and debt service. Lower rates to support employment and you risk feeding inflation that is increasingly being driven by energy, tariffs, supply constraints, government deficits, and geopolitical disruptions that interest rates cannot solve. The Fed cannot print oil, manufacture raw materials, or clear a manufacturing backlog.

The average American gets crushed from both sides. Confidence is already falling because people see their cost of living rising while they become less certain about their employment. A household can survive expensive groceries when wages are rising and jobs are plentiful. It becomes an entirely different economic environment when groceries remain expensive, wage growth falls behind prices, and employers stop hiring.

That is why September’s 29,000 jobs matter. It is not evidence of some sudden depression, but it is another warning that the economy is losing momentum while the cost-of-living problem has not disappeared. Stagflation does not require 1970s-style double-digit inflation and unemployment before people feel the pain. The squeeze begins when prices remain stubbornly high while employment opportunities, real wages, and confidence begin moving in the wrong direction at the same time.

The housing market is being squeezed from a direction most people still do not understand. The 30-year mortgage rate jumped from 7.03% to 7.28% in a single week, the largest weekly increase in roughly four years and the highest level in nearly three years. At the same time, the September jobs report showed the economy created only 29,000 jobs. The economy is weakening, yet the cost of borrowing to buy a house is going UP.

This is precisely why the endless obsession with the Federal Reserve misses the point. The Fed controls the overnight rate, but it does not dictate the entire yield curve. Mortgages are heavily influenced by longer-term bond yields, and the 10-year Treasury has climbed above 5% as investors demand greater compensation for inflation, enormous government borrowing, and fiscal risk. The 10-year just suffered its largest quarterly increase in yield since 1994.

Treasury Secretary Bessent embarrassed himself by declaring he was the house with the unilateral ability to change the trend. The Treasury expanded its long-term bond buyback program to as much as $6 billion. The 10-year yield was around 4.8% when the intervention began and subsequently broke above 5%, while September became the worst month for U.S. government bonds in four years. Bessent insisted the operation was successful because yields might have risen even further without it, but you cannot manipulate a $30+ trillion Treasury market with a few billion dollars when Washington is simultaneously flooding that same market with new debt. This is precisely what governments never understand: they may bully individual traders, change regulations, and temporarily distort prices, but they cannot dictate where global capital must go. Eventually, the market ALWAYS wins.

Washington has created a serious problem because the government itself is competing for capital. The national debt has crossed $40 trillion and Treasury must continuously issue enormous amounts of debt simply to finance deficits and refinance obligations that are maturing. Somebody has to buy that paper. When private investors demand higher yields to absorb it, those higher borrowing costs spread throughout the economy into mortgages, corporate debt, auto loans, and virtually everything else.

Housing is where ordinary people feel this immediately. Consider a $400,000 mortgage. At 3%, the principal and interest payment is roughly $1,686 per month. At 7.28%, it jumps to around $2,740. That is more than $1,000 every month for the SAME HOUSE before property taxes, insurance, maintenance, or homeowners association fees enter the picture. The house did not suddenly become larger or better. The cost of financing it exploded.

This has also created the mortgage lock-in problem. Millions of homeowners refinanced or purchased when mortgage rates were around 3%. Why would somebody voluntarily sell that home and replace a 3% mortgage with one above 7% unless they absolutely had to? Existing owners therefore remain trapped in place while prospective buyers face monthly payments that would have been unimaginable only several years ago.

The Federal Reserve is trapped. Employment is weakening and the economy added only 29,000 jobs in September, which ordinarily creates pressure for easier monetary policy. Yet inflation remains elevated and the bond market is demanding higher yields. Even if the Fed eventually lowers short-term rates, there is absolutely no guarantee mortgage rates will follow if investors continue demanding higher yields on long-term government debt.

This is what happens when government borrowing begins crowding out the private economy. Governments assume they can borrow whatever they want because there will always be another buyer for the bonds, but the buyer ultimately determines the PRICE. If investors demand 5% or more to finance Washington, every other borrower must compete against that return.

The housing affordability crisis therefore cannot be separated from the sovereign debt crisis. Government debt is no longer some abstract number sitting on a Treasury website. It works its way into the interest rate on your mortgage, the financing cost of the builder constructing the next subdivision, the loan used by the developer buying the land, and ultimately the monthly payment required from the family trying to purchase the house.

This is why the housing market can remain under pressure even while employment weakens. The old assumption was that a slowing economy automatically produced falling interest rates and cheaper mortgages. That relationship becomes far less reliable when government deficits remain enormous, inflation refuses to disappear, and bond investors demand greater compensation for holding sovereign debt.

The bond market is beginning to impose the discipline politicians refuse to impose upon themselves. Washington can run trillion-dollar deficits because politicians do not personally pay the interest. The taxpayer does, and increasingly so does the young family trying to purchase its first home. The government borrows without restraint, the bond market demands a higher return, and that higher cost of capital eventually finds its way into almost everything.

The housing crisis is therefore becoming much larger than housing. It is another symptom of a government debt problem that is steadily moving from Washington’s balance sheet into the household budget.

What is interesting is how the West has always dealt with Russia. They always LIE and have proven themselves outright untrustworthy. Not only did they sign a legally binding Minsk Agreement to allow the Donbas to vote on separating from Ukraine, but then they simply played Russia for a fool, with Merkel publicly admitting that they never intended to honor that agreement; they were buying time for Ukraine to build an army to obviously start this war.

The Minsk II agreement, formally known as the “Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements,” was signed on February 12, 2015. A separate Minsk Protocol (“Minsk I”) was signed on September 5, 2014.

Whether these agreements are legally binding remains highly contested and unresolved. No universal consensus exists on their legal status, and the answer depends heavily on which legal analysis or political position you consult. This is like going to a bank for a mortage and then claiming you never intended to actually make payments and the house is now yours.

The Case That They Are Legally Binding
Proponents of binding force, including Russia and China, argue that UN Security Council Resolution 2202 (2015), which “endorsed” the Package of Measures, elevated the agreements to a legally binding status under international law. This view holds that all UN member states are obligated to comply with Security Council resolutions. From this perspective, the Minsk agreements became the “only valid legal basis” for a settlement.

The Case That They Are Not Legally Binding
Opponents, including many Western legal scholars and Ukrainian officials, argue that Resolution 2202 was purely advisory and did not trigger the binding obligations of a Security Council “decision” under Article 25 of the UN Charter. The resolution’s language used terms like “endorses” and “welcomes,” which carry political approval rather than legal compulsion. Furthermore, the resolution was not adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which is required for enforcement measures.

A detailed 2021 legal analysis by the German Bundestag concluded that the agreements were political commitments, not binding international treaties. It noted that UN Security Council resolutions are only binding if the language and context indicate a “decision” rather than a “recommendation,” and Resolution 2202 did not meet this threshold. Other legal analysts have described the Minsk documents as “political agreements” or even a “private-law contract” with no formal international legal force.

The Minsk agreements are a political framework with intentio0nal ambiguous legal standing. They posed for pictures and touted this as a major event, and that means they not only lied to Russia, they lied to the press and the people. While Russia and China assert they are legally binding due to UN endorsement, most Western legal analyses conclude they were political commitments that lacked the formal characteristics of a binding international treaty. This unresolved legal ambiguity is a central reason why the agreements ultimately collapsed. Why would China or Russia agree to any peace agreement when the West never tells the truth and act like like some used car salesmen?

The deception and lies did not begin with the Minsk Agreement. There is substantial evidence that U.S. Secretary of State James Baker gave Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev assurances in February 1990 that NATO would NOT expand eastward. However, whether those assurances amounted to deliberate deception has been long debated. The declassified documents establish that the assurances were made. What they do not conclusively establish is that Washington deliberately intended to deceive Moscow when they were given.
The distinction is important because the dispute involves three separate issues: what was promised, whether those promises were binding, and whether American officials knew they would eventually violate them.
There is NO QUESTION that James Baker actually made that promise in February 1990. On February 9, 1990, Secretary of State James Baker met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow to discuss German reunification and the possibility of a united Germany remaining in NATO. Baker proposed that NATO’s jurisdiction would not move one inch eastward if Moscow accepted German reunification within NATO.

The American memorandum of the meeting records Baker saying:

“There would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.”

This was not merely a casual remark. Baker was exploring a diplomatic arrangement designed to secure Soviet acceptance of German reunification. The following day, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl also discussed NATO’s future with Gorbachev. Again, he offered similar assurances as was the case with other Western officials during the reunification negotiations.

The declassified American and Soviet records confirm the exchange. Baker also told Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that there would need to be firm guarantees against NATO’s eastward movement.

The conventional dishonest American argument pushed by the Neocons is that Baker’s statement concerned the deployment of NATO forces into the former East Germany, not a permanent prohibition on admitting Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or other Eastern European countries.
However, the declassified records complicate that interpretation. On January 31, 1990, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher proposed that NATO should rule out expansion toward Soviet borders. Then on February 6, Genscher discussed with British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd the possibility of Poland leaving the Warsaw Pact and subsequently joining NATO. He argued that the Soviets needed assurances that this would not happen immediately.

The discussions therefore extended beyond the territory of East Germany. The Neocons never care about anything other than their thirst for world domination. Make no mistake, these people have usurped American foreign policy and are leading the world to its destruction.

In December 2017, the National Security Archive at George Washington University published a collection of declassified American, Soviet, German, British and French documents under the title NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard.

Its researchers concluded that Soviet complaints about being misled had a substantial documentary foundation.

Was it intentional Neocon deception?

The case for deliberate deception laid out that Baker was an experienced diplomat who understood the importance of his words. His assurances were repeated, and other Western officials made similar statements. They assumed this was the US position.
These assurances helped persuade the Soviet leadership to accept German reunification within NATO.
The argument is that Western governments obtained a major strategic concession from Moscow and subsequently abandoned the assurances that had helped secure it. That is hard to just dismiss.

The case against deliberate deception presented by the warmongering-Neocons, rests on the February 1990 discussions they claim were part of an evolving negotiation, not a completed agreement. President George H. W. Bush’s administration subsequently moved away from Baker’s initial proposal as the Neocons directed. The final German reunification settlement, signed in September 1990, imposed specific military restrictions on the former East Germany but did NOT prohibit NATO from admitting other countries.
Furthermore, the Soviet Union still existed in February 1990. Its dissolution in December 1991 fundamentally transformed the European security environment. So they argue the USSR no longer existed so anything they promised was to an old government. This is a favorite tactic to default on sovereign debt. The new government is not obligated to pay the debt of the previous.
There is insufficient documentary evidence to establish that Baker already intended in February 1990 to encourage NATO’s later expansion while knowingly making a false promise to Gorbachev. Historian Joshua Shifrinson’s research, published in International Security, nevertheless supports the conclusion that the United States made genuine non-expansion offers during the 1990 negotiations.

Unclassified documents have surfaced confirming that actually Putin is correct — NATO had promised not to move one inch eastward and that Eastern Europe was to be a buffer zone of neutrality. NATO has been the agressor and they are NOT ever interested in peace because if there was really peace, then there is no need for NATO and all those people would lose jobs. Of course, mainstream media just read the Neocon script and keep propelling us into World War III. They do not care about the country or the people. Investigative journalism is gasping its last breaths.

This leaves a dangerous precedent. How can any peace agreement ever be taken seriously when the West wiggles out of everything they agreed to?

facts matter

Christopher Harborne is a British defense contractor. He is a major shareholder in QinetiQ, a UK defense technology company that holds Ministry of Defence (MoD) contracts. He donated £1 million pounds, the largest donations to any PM of Britain in history. The Boris took him to introduce him to officials in Ukraine.

Based on leaked documents from Johnson’s private office, the two-day visit took place from September 8, 2023. Harborne was officially registered as an “adviser, Office of Boris Johnson” for the high-level Yalta European Strategy (YES) forum in Kyiv.

The trip included meetings with top Ukrainian officials and a visit to Lviv. Notably, the itinerary mentioned a closed meeting at a military-tech R&D center, an area where Harborne has business interests as the largest shareholder in the British defense firm QinetiQ.

Context of the Relationship
This visit occurred less than a year after Harborne donated £1 million to a private company Johnson set up after resigning as Prime Minister. Leaked files also indicate the two had a prior call in January 2023 labeled as a “Ukraine readout”. By September 2024, Boris Johnson flew to Ukraine to stop any peace deal.

My sources in Ukraine informed me that Boris had just flown to meet with Zelensky informally to instruct him not to sign anything on rare earths with USA in Kiev, and to embarass Trump publicly into keep fund the war by insisting that the meeting should be at the White House. I warned the White House of the info I had received. Indeed, that is what took place and Zelensky follow his orders That was the spectacle on TV in February 2025. It has been Boris who has pushed Ukraine to total destruction. He is always there constantly to ensure war, and it seems his is paid to do so.

Johnson declared that Britain was in a proxy war with Russia back in November 2024. “It has been pathetic… Let’s face it: We’re waging a proxy war but not giving our proxies the ability to do the job. For years now, we’ve been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, and it has been cruel,”

Here is a video of Polish FM Sikorski who is a huge NEOCON saying:

• “Kremlin’s assets frozen in Europe and never going back to Russia”
• “They can be used [the assets] now to help prevent further destruction and make future reconstruction cheaper”
• “If the war ends tomorrow, Russia will remain a threat. We cannot afford to once again underestimate the danger of Moscow’s militarism.”

This last one reminds me of what they told Reagan after communism fell, “You can never trust a Russian”. This confirms it is personal hatred. This is why World War III is inevitable. They just hate Russians and are punishing all the people for their leaders who took them as hostages into a communist wonderland. Today, we have socialists who have undermined Europe’s economy with the very same theories of “material equality” and the rise of progressives in the USA and Canada all with the same dream of robbing the rich to create their would of equality.

Kalus Schwab, an academic, even had a bust of Lenin on his bookshelf. He too popularized: “You will own nothing and be happy.” These European leaders who are consumed with hatred of the Russian people, like the American South against the blacks because they lost the war with the North, are following the very same path that Lenin took Russia. End of free speech is always the first to go.

They overlook that Putin was particularly critical of Lenin and said he was not a statesman but just a Bolshevik in 2016. He said that Lenin created “a time bomb under our state.” He also denounced Stalin for massive purges that killed millions but noted his role in defeating the Nazis in WW II. Putin also blasted the Bolsheviks for making Russia lose World War I in their quest for power, making Russia suffer defeat by Germany and cede large chunks of territory just months before it lost World War I. “We lost to the losing party, a unique case in history,” Putin said.

Putin criticized the Communist ideology, noting that while promises of a fair and just society in the Communist ideology “resembled the Bible quite a lot,” the reality was different. “Our country didn’t look like the City of the Sun,” envisaged by socialist utopians, he said. Regarding Lenin’s tomb, Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Bukharin famously opposed the idea of Lenin’s embalming, while his late wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wrote for the Pravda newspaper in the year of his death: “Do not build for him monuments, castles in his name, (hold) opulent receptions in his memories etc. To all of this he assigned such little significance in life and it saddened him so.”

Vladimir Putin had denounced Lenin and his Bolshevik government for their brutal repressions and accused him of having placed a “time bomb” under the state. The criticism of Lenin, who is still revered by communists and many others in Russia, is unusual for the Russian president, who in the past carefully weighed his comments about the nation’s history to avoid alienating some voters. At the same time, he signalled that the government had no intention of taking Lenin’s body out of his Red Square tomb, warning against “any steps that would divide society.”

Putin’s assessment of Lenin’s role in Russian history during Monday’s meeting with pro-Kremlin activists in the southern city of Stavropol was markedly more negative than in the past. He denounced Lenin and his government for brutally executing Russia’s last tsar along with all his family and servants, killing thousands of priests and placing a time bomb under the Russian state by drawing administrative borders along ethnic lines.

As an example of Lenin’s destructive legacy, Putin pointed to Donbass, the industrial region in eastern Ukraine where a pro-Russia separatist rebellion flared up weeks after Russia’s March 2014 annexation of Crimea. More than 9,000 people have been killed in the conflict since April 2014, and clashes have continued despite a February 2015 peace deal.

He said Lenin’s government had whimsically drawn borders between parts of the USSR, placing Donbass under the Ukrainian jurisdiction in order to increase the percentage of proletariat in a move Putin called “delirious.”

They were against Reagan’s meeting with Gorbachev. I can tell you this because I was in a discussion in DC at the time. The Neocons tried to prevent that meeting, telling Reagan, “You can never trust a Russian.” These people are no different than the Southerners who blamed the blacks for the Civil War and transformed it into racism. They are evil and disgusting people who should be locked up in an insane asylum to save humanity. These people are EXTREMELY dangerous because they weasel their way into government to carry out a policy coup to wage war and destroy their perceived enemy and they do not care how many people die on the front lies for their objectives. They will ALWAYS reject peace. They are too consumed with personal hatred and that is the dark side of humanity.

While the Neocon twisted this into Putin wanted to retake Eastern Europe, this only showed their hatred of the Russian People. Putin enjoyed overwhelming support because he had NO INTENTION of return to Communism or restore the only USSR. He has been there since 1999. That Neocon propaganda to get funding for their warmongering policies has proven wrong.

If the United States collapsed, the same problem would emerge. American would be stranded from Okinawa to the Middle East. That is what has happened in the old USSR. The Neocons have used the Donbas to manufacture World War III to satisfy their personal hatred of the Russian people. Unfortunately, it is not Russia we need to defeat, we need to purge governments of this cancer within that will NEVER accept peace just as you just heard that Polish official.

The World Economic Forum is a globalist threat to humanity. They think a one world government is the answer. That was the idea behind the EU. That has failed. The Russians owned nothing, and they were NOT happy. I think this is our fate. Perhaps this time when we crash and burn and the future of our posterity has been consumed by a dark cloud created by these Neocons, just maybe, post 2032 we will reconstruct a government that wages war not by a few people who are unelected hiding in a back closed room, but adopt a real Democracy where

Must vote on taxes and war.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense hit the nail on the head. These Neocons usurp power, alter our foreign policy, and the assume that they represent the people.

Higher War Chances Mean Higher Interest Rates – Martin Armstrong

The problem is, the open borders was intended to shift the politics to always favor the LEFT. They counted on being able to tax the hell out of their native citizens to keep these upstanding new arrivals fed, clothed, and addicted to video games. What they did not foresee, the the mass migration of native Europeans elsewhere. This is never talked about. But when you look at the numbers, it looks like this is becoming the replacement theory, but the producers are starting to leave. Some worry that France can become the Radical Muslim State with nukes!

Europeans have been migrating to the USA, Canada, and South America, though the scale and patterns vary significantly by destination and time period. Here’s a breakdown of what recent data shows for each region.

European migration to the US has been declining in recent decades. A 2026 academic study notes that the modern era of US immigration is characterized by a decreasing flow of European migrants and an increasing flow from Latin America and Asia. This has been created by the ant-immigration policies in the USA.

A notable policy development occurred in September 2026, when the US resumed processing immigrant visas only for citizens of Poland and Hungary, while a broader moratorium remained in place for other countries.

Canada continues to attract Europeans, particularly through its International Experience Canada (IEC) program, which offers open work permits to young people from partner countries. In 2026, Canada issued tens of thousands of IEC invitations to Europeans. Key recipient countries included:

France: 658 invitations in one August round alone
Germany: 484 in the same round
United Kingdom: 309
Italy: 397
Ireland: 99

By early March 2026, Canada had issued 46,652 IEC invitations in total for the year . However, some programs have been restricted: Canada froze its Start-Up Visa program for entrepreneurs from over 30 European countries starting January 1, 2026.

South America has a long history of European immigration, particularly to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Today, European migration to the region continues, though it is often smaller in scale than intra-regional migration.

Paraguay has recently emerged as a notable destination. In the first half of 2026, Paraguay granted 1,132 residencies to Germans, 821 to Spaniards, 426 to Dutch citizens, and 358 to French citizens. We are see Europeans startin to migrate to Uruguay.

Brazil remains a major destination, with approximately 1.8 million immigrants:

Germans: 85,000 residents
Italians: 250,000 residents
Spanish: 75,000 residents
French: 65,000 residents
Portuguese: 40,000 annual visa renewals

Historically, southern Brazil (particularly Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul) received significant Swiss, German, and Italian immigration in the 19th century. Around 15,000 Swiss settled in southern Brazil between the 1810s and 1880s, though their descendants were later absorbed into a broader “German” identity due to language and cultural dynamics.

This trend appears to be shifting into a new bull market. Many can now smell war in the air in Europe.