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.

This year’s Institutional Report is an eyeopener. The world is undergoing a shift in preparation for 2032. We are witnessing a significant decline in the belief in American exceptionalism, particularly among younger generations in the U.S. However, this is a complex trend. While the belief in the nation’s unique moral and political superiority is waning thanks to the Neocons, the country’s economic and market performance still sets it apart in most respects yet it remains at risk from rising communistic and progressive socialism that demand engaging in class warfare tearing society apart at the seams.

The global landscape is entering what we have long identified as the “Panic Cycle” of 2026, a period where the structural weaknesses in the Western financial system converge with escalating multi-front geopolitical conflict with a significant global trend shift in 2027 taking the world into a significant economic low in 2028 infected by stagflation accelerated by rising conflicts that are unwinnable on many fronts.

This is not chaos; it follows a predictable rhythm of human behavior governed by the 8.6-year Economic Confidence Model (ECM) . We are currently witnessing the death throes of the Western republican form of government, which our models have projected to culminate in a systemic collapse by 2032 and a reorganization of political government in most of the world governments mired in republics. The convergence of sovereign debt crises, stagflationary energy shocks, and a shift from unipolar to multipolar conflict defines this outlook.

We are not heading toward a traditional World War III, but rather a simultaneous eruption of regional tensions that are all interconnected. The model indicates that the conflict in Ukraine, the tensions surrounding Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, and the dynamics in the South China Sea are not isolated events; they are manifestations of a single cycle of declining confidence in the established order.

As usual, we cover Europe, Middle East, Asia, South and North America.

$125,000

PRIVATE BLOG – Gold the August Rally (PRO)

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

https://ask-socrates.com/

View this post on Instagram

The World Economic Forum has openly proclaimed 2026 the “Year of Water” and has introduced what it calls “Blue Davos,” bringing freshwater, ocean policy, food security, investment, and the so-called blue economy together beneath one institutional umbrella. The Forum states that its annual meeting will concentrate on “freshwater access and management, blue food security and ocean protection.” Those words may sound harmless to anyone who has never studied how political power actually expands, but management always means that someone will decide who receives a resource, how much they may use, what price they must pay, and under what conditions access may be withdrawn.

Why has water suddenly become the great global priority? Why are the same organizations that lectured the world about carbon now speaking about basin-level partnerships, water finance, private-sector participation, international agreements, and scalable systems of allocation? The Forum itself says that “the complexity of the water crisis demands these ideas are scaled up, and fast.” Whenever unelected organizations insist that an alleged crisis requires policies to be scaled rapidly, the public should immediately ask who will acquire the power, who will provide the capital, and who will control the infrastructure after the emergency has passed.

The appearance of Peter Brabeck-Letmathe in this story is not some invention of social media. Brabeck, the former chief executive and chairman of Nestlé, previously chaired the 2030 Water Resources Group and served for years within the World Economic Forum’s leadership. When Klaus Schwab resigned in April 2025, the Forum’s board unanimously appointed Brabeck as interim chairman. He stepped down in August 2025, so it would be false to claim that he remains the current head, but the symbolism was extraordinary.

This thinking treats water as an asset to be measured, priced, financed, traded, and allocated through partnerships between governments and multinational corporations. They will describe this as resilience, sustainability, and efficient management, but history demonstrates that every system of centralized allocation eventually produces political preferences.

Bill Gates has also warned about the possibility of a sixth mass extinction due to water shortages. Gates did not say that an imminent mass extinction would be caused specifically by water shortages. Writing about Elizabeth Kolbert’s work, he stated that human activity was “leading to the sixth mass extinction in the Earth’s history,” adding, “Think of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs—only this time the cataclysm is man-made.”

The political class understands that water is different from every other commodity. People can reduce their use of gasoline, postpone the purchase of a car, turn down the thermostat, or survive without the latest technology, but nobody can opt out of water. Whoever controls its allocation possesses authority over agriculture, manufacturing, housing, food, population movement, and life itself. Oil shaped twentieth-century geopolitics because industrial economies depended upon it, but water will shape the coming era because civilization cannot exist without it at any price.

Artificial intelligence has now supplied the perfect justification for expanding this apparatus. Data centers require enormous quantities of electricity, while certain cooling systems consume water directly through evaporation. Other estimates include the water used to generate electricity and manufacture semiconductors, which means that public claims about AI’s water consumption often combine entirely different categories. There is a tremendous difference between water withdrawn, water circulated, water discharged, and water actually consumed, yet the headlines rarely explain these distinctions because frightening totals are politically more useful than transparent accounting.

@kerry84469

This guy is an expert. Why do they need all that water?#nowaterneeded

♬ original sound – Kerry

The man in the video above owns a company, Enseva, and he holds 12 patents on designing and building data centers without using water. Cooling designs vary, closed systems can recirculate water, dry cooling can sharply reduce consumption, and facilities in different climates cannot be compared honestly through a single universal estimate. Are the authorities measuring the actual requirements of particular facilities, or are projected AI demands being used to justify infrastructure, restrictions, and allocation powers that extend far beyond AI?

Crucial question that I am not too afraid to ask: Are they hoarding and storing water?

Every proposed data center should disclose its expected withdrawals, actual consumption, water source, cooling design, discharge volume, electricity-related water footprint, drought contingency plan, and contractual priority during shortages. If officials cannot provide those numbers, they have no legitimate basis for demanding that households, farms, or small businesses surrender access in the name of technological progress.

@austinwrites_

I found where all the water for ai is coming from… #water #hike #wow #plumbing #environment

♬ original sound – austinwrites_

The water wars will not necessarily begin with soldiers marching toward a river. They will begin through permits, compulsory meters, emergency declarations, tiered pricing, groundwater restrictions, digital monitoring, and public-private agreements that few citizens will ever read. They will appear as administrative decisions made by experts who insist that no alternative exists, while governments blame climate change, corporations blame AI, and international organizations demand that authority be centralized before the crisis becomes worse.

The shift from green to blue is not merely a change in environmental branding. It represents the movement of political attention and investment capital toward the most indispensable resource on Earth. Once water becomes fully financialized and access is integrated into centralized systems of permission, the government will no longer need to confiscate property directly because it will possess something far more powerful—the ability to determine whether that property may receive water.

The next great struggle will be presented as conservation against waste, science against ignorance, and collective survival against selfish individual use. Yet beneath the slogans will remain the oldest political question in civilization: who decides? If the public waits until that decision has been transferred permanently to an alliance of bureaucrats, financiers, and multinational corporations, the water wars will already have been lost before most people even realized they had begun.

Reuters reports that 1,600 Danish recruits began an expanded 11-month term of military service on August 3, up from only four months under the previous system. Denmark has extended conscription to women, plans to increase the annual intake from roughly 5,000 to 7,500 by 2033, and will send conscripts to Greenland for the first time. Europe is not preparing for peace. It is preparing an entire generation for a war its political class refuses to prevent.

The new Danish program requires five months of basic training followed by six months of operational service. New tracks include drone warfare, and more than 100 conscripts will be sent to Greenland to assume military duties previously performed by professional soldiers. The government calls this security. I call it the gradual conversion of ordinary citizens into military assets for politicians who have spent years escalating every dispute they could have negotiated.

Denmark still uses volunteers before filling vacancies through a lottery, but a lottery backed by state coercion is still conscription. Every healthy man and woman who turns 18 enters a system that can seize nearly one year of life because politicians in Copenhagen, Brussels, and NATO have decided that Russia represents a permanent threat. When voluntary recruitment no longer supplies enough bodies, the meaning of “service” will become much clearer.

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen says Denmark is prepared to defend every inch of NATO territory, “including our own.” That statement also refers to Greenland, where Trump’s repeated demands for American control have created a separate confrontation. Denmark is therefore invoking both Russia and the United States to justify a military expansion that began with Ukraine and now extends into the Arctic.

The Danes are told that Moscow may eventually attack NATO, although Russia has struggled for years to achieve limited territorial objectives in Ukraine. Russia has neither the manpower nor the economic incentive to occupy Europe. Invading a NATO member would also trigger a confrontation with an alliance possessing vastly greater combined resources and nuclear weapons. The story that Russian tanks are preparing to roll from Ukraine through Denmark is political propaganda designed to frighten the public into surrendering money and children.

Denmark says it has supplied approximately €9.7 billion in military support and €1.1 billion in civilian assistance to Ukraine, excluding its indirect contributions through the European Union. Its national Ukraine Fund allocated DKK 60.4 billion, or roughly €8.1 billion, for military support between 2023 and 2028. Copenhagen then announced a 30th military package worth another DKK 4.4 billion, approximately $672 million, in June 2026.

This is an enormous commitment for a country with only about six million people. Denmark has provided F-16 aircraft, artillery, tanks, missiles, drones, air-defense equipment, ammunition, training, and direct financing for Ukrainian weapons production. It pioneered the so-called Danish model under which outside governments pay Ukrainian companies to manufacture weapons for Kyiv.

Military and security spending has risen to roughly 3.5% of Danish GDP in 2026. Denmark created a DKK 50 billion fund, about $7 billion, to accelerate military purchases and has already aligned itself with NATO’s march toward a broader 5% defense-and-security objective. Before the Ukraine conflict, NATO’s European members spent far less, but fear has become the most effective budgetary weapon invented by government.

The Danish budget surplus is already projected to fall from 2.9% of GDP in 2025 to 0.9% in 2026 and 0.5% in 2027. The European Commission explicitly attributes that deterioration partly to greater defense spending and support for Ukraine. Even a fiscally stronger country is being pulled toward the same war economy consuming the rest of Europe.

The debt problem explains why Brussels embraces militarization with such enthusiasm. Governments that cannot win public support for unlimited borrowing can always manufacture an emergency. Climate was used to justify joint programs, subsidies, taxation, and centralized authority. COVID was used to suspend fiscal restraints and expand government power. Now Russia is being used to place defense spending beyond normal budget limitations.

Germany changed its constitutional fiscal rules to permit enormous military borrowing. The European Union proposed a €2 trillion seven-year budget containing €131 billion for militarization, five times the previous defense allocation. Brussels created loan schemes for weapons, while NATO members committed themselves to spending targets that will redirect trillions into defense contractors and government-controlled projects.

NATO was expected to spend around $1.59 trillion in 2025, with Canada and Europe accounting for approximately $608 billion. The June 2025 Hague commitment to move toward 5% of GDP by 2035 will require a staggering transfer of capital from the productive economy into the military establishment. Europe cannot find money to reduce taxes, restore cheap energy, or revive industry, but it always discovers another billion for weapons and Ukraine.

The draft is the human side of that transfer. First, they take the taxpayer’s income. Then they borrow against the taxpayer’s future. Finally, when the professional military cannot meet the politicians’ ambitions, they take the taxpayer’s children. The state consumes capital and labor to defend a strategy that the public was never allowed to vote upon honestly.

They will sell Denmark’s program as equality because women are now subject to the same coercion as men. Equality does not transform state compulsion into liberty. A government violating everyone equally is still violating everyone. True equality would permit every adult to decide whether a foreign geopolitical project is worth sacrificing eleven months, a career, a family, or eventually a life.

According to the European Council on Foreign Relations, support for mandatory military service reached 62% in France, 53% in Germany, and 51% in Poland. Yet the most revealing numbers appear when the German results are divided by age, because net opposition among those aged 18 to 29 reached 46%, while net support among respondents over 70 stood at 49%.

The people safely beyond military age are volunteering the young for war. They will not receive the draft notice, undergo the medical examination, surrender their careers, or be ordered into a trench. They will watch the war on television while congratulating themselves for supporting “national service,” as if clicking yes in a poll were an act of personal courage.

There is something profoundly immoral about demanding a sacrifice that you will never be required to make. If those over 70 believe so passionately in military service, governments can create senior battalions and hand them the rifles first. Let the politicians, retired bureaucrats, television commentators, and comfortable academics who preach war demonstrate their convictions personally before they conscript an 18-year-old who wants nothing to do with their geopolitical fantasies.

Europe’s political class speaks endlessly about democracy, yet conscription is the state claiming ownership over the individual. It declares that your body, your time, and perhaps your life belong to the government whenever politicians decide that their diplomatic failures require fresh blood. They call this “service” because admitting that it is involuntary servitude would reveal the policy for what it actually is.

The contradiction becomes even more obscene when the same governments that neglected their militaries, mismanaged their economies, destroyed affordable energy, and antagonized foreign powers suddenly lecture the young about duty. These politicians created the crisis, accumulated the debt, dismantled Europe’s industrial base, and refused every opportunity for serious diplomacy. Their solution is now to seize a generation that had no voice in those decisions and force it to pay the bill.

Young Europeans understand precisely what is being demanded of them. They are being told that they must sacrifice their freedom to preserve a political order that has saddled them with unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, deteriorating public services, crushing taxation, and mountains of sovereign debt. The establishment has offered them no future, yet it suddenly insists that they must be prepared to die defending it.

Politicians carefully disguise conscription as a matter of shared responsibility, but the burden will never be shared equally. The children of the politically connected will find administrative positions, medical exemptions, university deferments, or comfortable assignments far from the front. It has always been the working class that supplies the bodies while the ruling class supplies the speeches.

Modern warfare makes this deception even more grotesque. These young people would not be marching through fields in some romantic nineteenth-century campaign. They could be tracked by satellites, hunted by drones, targeted by precision missiles, and killed by an operator sitting hundreds of miles away. Those advocating conscription are discussing human beings as replaceable military inventory while pretending that the word “duty” somehow sanitizes the transaction.

Europe’s aging political establishment cannot manufacture patriotism by decree. Patriotism must be earned through competent government, legitimate institutions, and a nation that respects the rights of its citizens. A government that treats young people as taxable assets in peacetime and disposable assets in wartime should not be surprised when they refuse to participate.

The young are not cowards for rejecting conscription, nor do elderly voters become courageous by supporting it. Courage means accepting danger yourself; hypocrisy means assigning that danger to someone else. Until the loudest advocates of war are willing to stand at the front of the recruitment line, their demands for sacrifice are merely the politics of cowardice dressed in the flag.

QUESTION: Do you mind if I ask something personal? It’s clear the neoconservatives aren’t fond of you, and I imagine the feeling is mutual. Since I know you’ve met quite a few of them face-to-face, was there a particular moment or encounter that personally struck a nerve with you?

EJ

ANSWER: That is an interesting question. Aside from being misled that I initially believed they were economic conservatives, I came to see their disregard for human life and history. I lost high school friends in Vietnam. Others in Iraq. My family has fought in every American war. My cousin still has the musket from the Armstrong who fought in the American Revolution. There’s a profound difference between defending your homeland and being sent to war on false pretenses to satisfy some deranged political theory of world domination.

The Vietnam veterans I’ve known are among the most anguished. They carry the weight of knowing, even today, that they were sent to fight for a lie. Neoconservatism, at its core, tends to elevate ideological and strategic goals above the human toll of warfare. That’s certainly a point of fierce political disagreement, but if you look at the ideology, its history, and how it’s played out, it becomes clearer why so many see it that way—and why that perspective feels deeply personal to those of us who’ve lost people along the way. From Project Northwoods willing to kill American civilians just to blame it on Cuba to justify a war to assassinatinge JFK because he sought peace with the USSR.

This ideology’s roots goes back to the debunked political theory of Trotskyite ideology of the early 20th Century. This is a reference to the fact that many early neoconservatives were former LEFTISTS who became disillusioned with liberalism and the counterculture of the 1960s . Irving Kristol was  a disillusioned liberal who became a foundational figure of neoconservatism. While he held a deep concern for the survival of Israel and wrote about it in those terms, there has always been a debate if he and other were covertly just wanted war to protect Israel in the direct sense.

Irving Kristol remained sympathetic to the goals of the New Deal and the Great Society, but he grew skeptical of government planning and what he saw as the vague idealism of left-wing ideologues. He rejected the conservative anti-New Deal stance of Barry Goldwater in 1964, but also distrusted the radical dissent of the counterculture. While he is credited with this dogmatic view, I knew his son and even helped him start his magazine the Weekly Standard taking the back page to kick off his venture.

I came to understand that I was wrong. Bill was not about economic conservatism. This was all about geopolitical war and indeed to support Israel. I had discussions about how taking down Saddam Husein in Iraq and then others was necessary to bring peace to the Middle East. This dogmatic view concerned me. Bill Kristol was so anti-Trump because he was against war that he killed his own magazine with his Neocon views. Bill Kristol, the prominent neoconservative commentator and founder of The Weekly Standard, did endorse Kamala Harris for president in the 2024 election along with Dick Cheney. This proved their movement was never about economics.

The Neocon ideology is characterized by a strong endorsement of military instruments to promote what is viewed as the U.S. national interest, a concept scholars describe as a mix of “assertive nationalism” and “militarism.” The belief is that American military might should be used to spread democracy and freedom, even by force and without international cooperation if necessary. I disagreed since I believed that the very usurpation of power to effectively create a coup of American foreign policy was taking place before my eyes during Bush Jr’s administration.

This was all justified by a powerful sense of American exceptionalism and a moralistic view of the world, dividing it into allies and adversaries I came to see was a reaction to Khrushchev’s (1953-1964) “we will bury you” boast of November 18th, 1956 spoken at the Polish Embassy. That boast was standard Communist view that recessions and depression was a flaw of Capitalism and this Marxism would eliminate that.

The Neocon stated goal became more radical after Irving to justify using U.S. power to create a world of democracies, which, in their view, are inherently more peaceful. Being a student of political systems, we ourselves did not live under a democracy. I saw a usurpation of power through UNELECTED means to achieve a fake goal of morality that allowed them to look at themselves in the mirror as righteous rather than usurpers seeking to create peace by killing all your enemies.

What I write about is not conspiracy theory. For whatever reason, I seem to have ended up in the middle of so many things, which is why they are so determined to try to prevent people from listening to me.

This is an important report discussing the real implications of Gold and why it is NOT a hedge against inflation or against transitory geopolitical events. This goes into the real driving forces behind gold and it also includes silver. This is the PARADOX how gold has declined with rising oil and geopolitics that all comes back to what do you believe. This includes projections into 2032.

PRIVATE BLOG – The Crash

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

https://ask-socrates.com/