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.

QUESTION:  Marty,

I’m seeing online sources-videos, comments and AI say that “Socrates model forecasts a collapse in paper derivative markets, explicitly warning investors that paper spot prices on exchanges will completely disconnect from physical metal reality as physical shortages mount and sovereign debt crises escalate.”

I subscribe to Socrates and watch all your interviews and have never heard you discuss this. Is this accurate?

I’d appreciate if you could set the record straight with a quick reply.
Thank you in advance.

Alex

ANSWER: This AI is becoming a problem where people can make posts mimicking my voice and I have even seen videos while other try to prevent people from reading our site. Some people with self-interests try to make false forecasts that we have NOT made to influence people to buy often in the metals.

There will not be a collapse in derivative markets and this rush to spot metals. There is not enough metal in the world to end currency and only after 2032 are we looking at a redenomination of assets. After the hyperinflation and the fall of the Weimar Republic in Germany, they came out with a new currency in 1925 and it was backed by real estate. This is what I am talking about. Tangible assets from metals, real estate, shares in companies, all make that transition from one currency to the next.

There are people who hat my guts because I have not agreed with them. They have been adamant that derivatives hold gold prices down. They have taken the same position concerning gold leasing, which they also insist suppresses gold.

I am tired of all the BS with bankers who lose money blaming me that I have too much influence to some goldbugs who say the same thing as if I was eliminate gold would soar. Markets are far bigger than anyone from central banks to an individual.

Everyone acts in their own self interest. Compare gold in USD and Euro. You will see that in Euro, gold made new lows into August. In USD, the los war July intraday and a close it was June. I have been the only international adviser with offices around the world from China to Dubai. Giving advice to buy with no regard for the currency is not being a responsible analyst. This is why Socrates allows you to take any market and replot it in whatever currency you like. Telling an American in July to buy gold for a bounce would lead to a loss for a European.

That forecast is clearly ABSURD and it is not by me nore Socrates. I recommend that you stay with our site to verify any such claim.

We have sold out of this book. We are having another printing ordered and it should be here by September 15th.

I never considered myself an academic economist. I was a trader. That distinction has led me around the world with a front-row seat all because the floating exchange rate was born on August 15th, 1971 and even then it was supposed to be just temporary. Foreign Exchange futures just began trading in 1972. That only emerged when it was becoming obvious that what was intended to be temporary was becoming permanent. Consequently, none of this was ever taugt in school. When the first bank failure took place in 1974, Franklin National Bank, I knew a senior man in the bank and he knew I understood this new thing of floating currencies. This was all before hedging or understanding currency risk. The bank failed on a 10% move of the Italian lira. There were no academics to call in back then. After I looked at the problem, whatever currency crisis developed came down to getting the guy who did the Franklin National Bank one.

This book is about how the world economy really functions. I have been called in from the Middle East even being on the phone in an OPEC meeting to being called by by the central bank of China during the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis. I have attended many board meetings of major multinational corporations and restructured companies to survive the new age of international capital flows.

I have tried my best to relay what I have experienced and learned over more than 50 years. I have witnessed the evolution of the world economy from every side and it has been a fascinating journey. This is a text book on how the world really functions with just over 600 pages fully illustrated in color.

It is also time to abandon domestically confined analysis and theories and understand how the world truly functions, for everything is interconnected.

Understanding the World Economy

PRIVATE BLOG – Crude to Exceed $200

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/

The Center for Strategic and International Studies conducted an extraordinary survey of 64 leading experts on China, Taiwan, and cross-Strait relations, including 28 former senior U.S. government officials, 23 former government policy and intelligence analysts, and 13 academics and think-tank experts. What their answers reveal is not that China is preparing to invade Taiwan tomorrow, as the neocons would like everyone to believe, but that Beijing remains willing to wait so long as nobody crosses the line of formal Taiwanese independence. Some 84% said Beijing is willing to wait for unification but will not accept the status quo permanently, while only 10% believed China seeks unification at the earliest opportunity. Not one of the 64 experts believed Beijing would ever accept an independent Taiwan.

This is precisely why Taiwan has become so dangerous. The West keeps portraying the conflict as if Xi Jinping wakes up every morning staring at a calendar trying to decide when to launch an amphibious invasion. Yet 83% of these experts said China did not plan to use significant kinetic force against Taiwan by 2027, and 80% said China’s enormous 2022 military exercises did not indicate Beijing had accelerated its timetable. Only 6% of respondents outside the former senior government group saw 2027 as a hard deadline, while not one former senior U.S. official did. The obsession with 2027 has nevertheless become extremely useful for the military establishment because every supposed deadline becomes another justification for weapons, deployments, bases, and spending.

The survey found that 44% believed Beijing has a hard deadline of 2049, the centennial of the People’s Republic, while 42% believed China could wait indefinitely provided unification remains possible. This is an important distinction because China thinks in terms of generations while Western politicians think in terms of the next election. Beijing does not need to invade Taiwan if economic, political, and military pressure can gradually change the situation in its favor. Only 20% of those surveyed believed China even possessed a coherent roadmap for peaceful unification, which tells us this is not some perfectly scripted invasion plan sitting in Xi’s desk drawer.

Where the numbers become alarming is not an unprovoked invasion but what happens when politicians begin crossing China’s red lines. More than three-quarters of the experts, 77%, believed China would invade within six months if Taiwan formally declared independence. Among former senior U.S. officials, that number was 79%. Even some of those who did not expect an immediate invasion believed Beijing would respond with a blockade or enormous military exercises. This is why politicians encouraging Taiwan toward formal independence are playing with the lives of 23 million people. They can deliver all the speeches they want about democracy from Washington, London, or Brussels, but they will not be the civilians sitting underneath the missiles if their political experiment goes wrong.

Not one expert believed an explicit American commitment to defend Taiwan would cause China to invade immediately, but 64% believed Beijing would respond strongly enough to provoke a U.S.-China or China-Taiwan crisis, while another 31% expected a more limited negative response. Only two of the 64 experts believed formally committing America to Taiwan’s defense would actually deter China from using force because Beijing already assumes that the United States will intervene anyway.

A direct invasion is not even the most likely path toward conflict. Only 8% of the experts described an amphibious invasion within ten years as likely, while 63% called it possible and 27% unlikely. Force short of invasion received much higher probabilities, with 52% saying deliberate escalation such as a blockade was likely or very likely. An accidental military incident was considered even more dangerous, with 34% saying a collision or accident around the Taiwan Strait was likely and another 22% calling it very likely. When warships and aircraft from opposing nuclear powers continually operate around the same small body of water, war does not require some grand master plan. It requires one mistake followed by politicians who refuse to back down.

A later CSIS survey of American and Taiwanese experts reinforces that point. Roughly 90% of U.S. experts and 62% of Taiwanese experts believed China already possessed the capability to impose a law-enforcement-led quarantine that substantially reduces trade into Taiwan. Around 80% of American experts and 60% of Taiwanese experts believed Beijing could execute a PLA blockade, while Taiwanese experts were considerably more skeptical that China could successfully carry out an invasion. If Beijing wanted to coerce Taiwan during the following five years, experts considered a quarantine the most likely option. If China decided it wanted immediate unification, however, approximately 80% regarded a highly kinetic joint blockade as likely or very likely.

This is where the economic consequences become enormous because Taiwan does not need to be invaded for the world economy to be thrown into chaos. A quarantine or blockade would immediately threaten shipping, insurance, semiconductor supply chains, electronics, automobiles, communications equipment, and virtually every modern industry dependent upon advanced chips. The later CSIS survey found most American and Taiwanese experts did not believe Taiwan could withstand a Chinese blockade for longer than three months without substantial U.S. intervention. Washington would then face the decision nobody wants to discuss honestly: accept China’s blockade or attempt to break it militarily and risk direct war between two nuclear powers.

Taiwan is also the world’s semiconductor pressure point. The island’s importance to advanced chip manufacturing means a serious blockade would not remain a regional event. Factories thousands of miles away could discover that a conflict they thought had nothing to do with them suddenly prevents them from obtaining critical components. Markets would begin repricing the risk immediately, shipping premiums would explode, companies would scramble for inventory, and governments would discover once again how fragile global supply chains have become. This is why capital will react long before politicians formally declare that a war has begun.

What I find particularly revealing in the later CSIS survey is the difference between American confidence and Taiwanese confidence in Washington. An astonishing 96% of American experts were completely or moderately confident that the United States would intervene militarily if China invaded Taiwan during the following five years. Taiwanese experts were less confident in American intervention and considerably less confident that U.S. allies would join the fight. It is always easier for people thousands of miles away to be certain about somebody else’s war.

This is precisely why Taiwan remains one of the critical geopolitical pressure points as we move toward 2029. The danger is not simply that China arbitrarily decides to invade. The greater danger is escalation, miscalculation, political promises that cannot be withdrawn, and Western policymakers convincing themselves that every additional provocation somehow produces deterrence. China has made its position on formal independence perfectly clear, and even the experts inside the Western foreign-policy establishment overwhelmingly acknowledge that Beijing would react with force if that line were crossed.

If Taiwan declares formal independence, 77% of the experts surveyed believed China would invade within six months. That is not a statistic policymakers should treat as another war-game scenario. It is a warning about what happens when politicians deliberately remove the ambiguity that has helped keep the peace.

Wholesale prices were unchanged in July, coming in below expectations for a 0.2% increase. The Producer Price Index was flat after a revised 0.1% decline in June, while the annual rate fell sharply to 4.7% from 5.5%. Wholesale prices are still 4.7% higher than a year ago, and beneath that flat headline number there are several very different forces moving in opposite directions.

The primary reason July looked so tame was goods, and particularly energy. Final-demand goods prices declined 0.7%, with energy falling 3.1% and food dropping 0.9%. This follows the enormous energy shock earlier this year when final-demand goods surged 2.8% in May, the largest monthly increase since that series began in 2009. Energy jumped 10.7% that month and gasoline alone surged 23.4%. You cannot look at the subsequent decline and pretend the original price increase never occurred. Energy exploded, retreated from that spike, and therefore dragged July’s monthly PPI downward.

This is precisely why I would be extremely cautious about declaring victory over inflation. July PPI probably did not fully capture the late-July increase in oil prices. Energy works its way through virtually everything because businesses do not simply purchase gasoline. They pay for diesel, electricity, transportation, plastics, fertilizer, chemicals, refrigeration, manufacturing, shipping, and eventually higher insurance costs when geopolitical tensions threaten transportation routes. A temporary decline in petroleum can make an inflation report look beautiful for a month, but if energy reverses, those costs begin working their way through the entire production chain again.

Services tell a very different story from goods. Final-demand services increased 0.2% in July, and portfolio-management fees surged 6.5%. Freight transportation costs declined 1.8%, providing some relief, but the underlying service economy remains under pressure.

Producer prices excluding food and energy increased 0.2% in July and remained 4.2% higher than one year ago. More importantly, the measure excluding food, energy, and trade services increased 0.4% for the month and 4.7% annually. That tells us that once you strip away the volatile decline in energy and some of the distortions from trade margins, underlying producer inflation is hardly sitting at the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

This is the problem with reducing inflation to a single number. A farmer looks at fertilizer, diesel, machinery, interest rates, seed, labor, and transportation. A restaurant owner looks at food, electricity, rent, wages, insurance, and financing. A manufacturer looks at commodities, energy, components, shipping, tariffs, and borrowing costs. Each business experiences a completely different inflation rate, and eventually those costs either have to be absorbed through lower profit margins or passed along to consumers.

CPI rose only 0.1% in July and 3.4% annually, while core CPI came in at 2.5%. Now PPI has also surprised to the downside, and naturally everyone will begin demanding that the Federal Reserve ease. Reuters reports that the federal funds rate remains at 3.50% to 3.75%, while the latest inflation and labor data strengthen the argument for leaving rates unchanged at the September meeting rather than tightening further. Estimates derived from the latest inflation data put July core PCE at approximately 0.2% for the month and 3.3% annually.

There is also a tremendous difference between producer inflation and consumer inflation because companies do not pass costs through immediately. Businesses initially absorb higher expenses by reducing margins, changing suppliers, shrinking products, eliminating employees, automating operations, or postponing investment. Only when those measures become insufficient do they raise prices aggressively. PPI therefore gives us a look into the pipeline, but it does not tell us exactly when or how much of that pressure ultimately reaches the consumer.

This is particularly important now because American businesses are already dealing with a consumer who is stretched thin. Grocery spending is slowing, small-business bankruptcies are rising, foreclosures are increasing, credit card balances remain enormous, and households are becoming increasingly price-sensitive. Companies may therefore have less ability to pass higher costs onto customers even when their own expenses increase. That does not necessarily eliminate inflation. It can instead destroy margins and eventually businesses, which is an entirely different economic problem.

The July report is certainly better than another 2.8% explosion in goods prices like we saw in May, but it does not demonstrate that inflation has been defeated. Goods fell because energy and food provided substantial relief while services continued higher and the broad core measure excluding food, energy, and trade services rose 0.4%. The annual PPI remains 4.7%, and the late-July oil increase may not yet be fully reflected in these numbers. That is hardly an environment where anyone should assume prices are about to return to what Americans remember before the inflationary surge.

What we are seeing is inflation moving through different layers of the economy at different speeds. Energy can plunge one month and surge the next, commodities respond to war and supply, services remain sticky, businesses absorb costs until their margins break, and consumers finally see whatever remains at the end of that chain. July provided relief at the wholesale level, but the underlying numbers remain far too elevated to declare that this cycle is finished.

Germany has spent more than a decade lecturing everyone about the supposed moral virtue of opening the borders, and now the numbers coming out of its own prisons are becoming impossible to conceal. According to figures obtained from all 16 German state justice ministries, roughly 27,000 of the 60,408 people held in prisons or pretrial detention in March 2026 were foreign nationals. That is 44.8% of the entire prison population, compared with roughly 30% in 2015. Foreign nationals represent less than 17% of Germany’s overall population, yet they account for nearly half of those behind bars.

Think about what that means. The political establishment invited millions of people into Germany under the banner of humanitarianism, dismissed everyone who questioned the consequences, and insisted that diversity would somehow pay for itself. Now Berlin has reached the point where 59% of its inmates are foreign nationals and Hamburg is at approximately 58%. Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, and Hesse have also crossed the 50% threshold. These statistics do not even count a foreign-born offender who later obtained German citizenship as foreign, so nationality data cannot tell us the full migration background of the prison population.

The government cannot simply dismiss this as right-wing propaganda because the prison system itself is sounding the alarm. René Müller, chairman of the German Association of Prison Officers, said that “language barriers are a major problem” and warned that officers are increasingly struggling to rehabilitate inmates or even communicate effectively with them. He further warned that communication failures contribute to aggression, isolated prison subcultures, and the danger of Islamist radicalization behind bars. Bavaria’s Justice Ministry has likewise acknowledged conflicts arising from language difficulties and what it called “culturally determined behaviors.”

This is what happens when politicians make immigration policy according to ideology rather than economics, culture, security, or the ability of a society to absorb enormous demographic change. Angela Merkel’s government threw open the doors in 2015 and anyone who questioned the wisdom of that policy was immediately attacked. Yet the foreign share of Germany’s prison population has risen from around 30% in 2015 to nearly 45% today. You cannot indefinitely suppress statistics simply because they offend the political narrative.

The taxpayer is then forced to pay at every stage. They finance asylum processing, housing, welfare programs, integration programs, policing, courts, interpreters, incarceration, and eventually rehabilitation. Germany’s prison system was costing taxpayers roughly €4.14 billion annually, with approximately €1.82 billion associated with incarcerating foreign nationals at that time. That is not the fault of every immigrant, nor does being foreign make someone a criminal, but pretending that migration policy has no fiscal or security consequences is equally dishonest.

Europe’s political class refuses to understand that a government has a fundamental obligation to its own citizens. Immigration should benefit the country accepting the immigrant. It is not supposed to become an unlimited social experiment where politicians collect applause in Brussels while working people are forced to absorb every economic and social cost. Germany needed skilled workers because its demographic structure was deteriorating, but importing people without regard to skills, integration, culture, or criminal risk was never a coherent economic policy.

The most infuriating aspect is that ordinary Germans were never permitted an honest debate. Anyone who questioned Merkel’s migration policy was branded xenophobic, extremist, or far-right. The establishment learned that censorship was easier than answering uncomfortable questions. Yet you cannot censor a prison census. You cannot lecture a statistic into changing its opinion. When foreign citizens make up less than one-fifth of the population but nearly half of the people incarcerated, there is a disparity requiring serious examination, not another government-funded campaign explaining why citizens should ignore what they can plainly see.

This is also precisely how governments manufacture political extremism. They create a problem, refuse to discuss it, demonize anyone who raises it, and then act shocked when voters eventually abandon establishment parties. People do not suddenly wake up one morning and become angry at government. Governments spend years earning that anger.

Germany is already suffering economically from some of the worst policy decisions in its postwar history. It destroyed its energy advantage, crippled industry with climate mandates, sanctioned cheap Russian energy while pretending American LNG could seamlessly replace it, and increased military expenditure while the domestic economy struggled. Now the same population that is expected to pay for this economic incompetence is being told that discussing the consequences of mass migration is somehow morally unacceptable. A country cannot remain politically stable when its citizens begin to believe their government values an ideology more than their safety. That is the road Germany is traveling, and the prison statistics are simply one more visible symptom.

The elites will undoubtedly continue calling everyone who discusses these numbers an extremist. They have run out of arguments, so labels are all they have left. But Germany cannot imprison 27,000 foreign nationals and then demand that the public pretend there is nothing worth discussing. This is not compassion. It is government malpractice.

Many requests have been pouring in for an updated forecast for the 2026 Midterm Elections and beyond. We have put this report together with the computer forecast arrays out to 2036. This report dives into the Great Divide politically and this is part of the process as we move into 2032 when we get to redesign government and enjoy perhaps a Direct Democracy and what that will mean. For the first time, we dive into the rigging of the 2020 election. Trump was looking in all the WRONG places. This was an international conspiracy that was even linked to COVID to lock people down leading to a massive surge in mail-in ballots all intentional.

This offers a view beyond 2032 at least for major decisions like war bringing an end to this UNELECTED usurpation of foreign policy all for the vengeance of these Neocons who want perpetual conflict for vengeance or profit. They love to stay safe in their bunkers while sending other people’s children to death. Robert McNamara apologized before he died for the Vietnam War saying Russia was not involved, it was just a civil war. They have lied about every war or were just too biased to see the truth like WMD in Iraq didn’t exit.

Hopefully, 2032 will bring into focus the light at the end of the tunnel. These Neocons have  been the problem since Vietnam, which was the subject of the song:

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Fortunate Son

Special Report – $39.95

We uploaded the wrong version that did not have the 3 main solutions. Those who have purchased this report may download the correct version free of charge. There are only three ways to perhaps avoid the plans of these Neocons.