Category Blogger Martin Armstrong

Sep 28 2026

The Blockade Has Done What Sanctions Could Not


Posted originally on Sep 28, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |

Analysis: Why a US blockade threatens Iran's oil industry | AP News

For years, Washington proclaimed that sanctions would shut down Iranian oil exports. They never did. Iran adapted because markets ALWAYS adapt. Tehran assembled a shadow fleet, tankers switched off transponders, cargoes changed identities, oil moved ship to ship, and payments bypassed Western banking channels while China continued buying the crude. Even during Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign in 2019 and 2020, Iranian oil continued passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Washington could sanction the paperwork, banks, insurance companies, and ships, but somebody still wanted the oil. The blockade has changed everything because you cannot hide geography.

Reuters reports that Iran went roughly seven weeks without meaningful crude exports passing through Hormuz. Iranian crude and condensate loadings collapsed from roughly 2 MILLION barrels per day in March to 740,000 in July and merely 220,000 to 255,000 barrels per day in August. This is the fundamental difference between sanctions and a blockade. Sanctions tell someone they cannot conduct a transaction, so markets find another currency, bank, company, flag, or jurisdiction. A blockade says the tanker cannot leave. You can rename the vessel twelve times and create twenty shell corporations, but eventually that ship still has to sail through the water.

Iran’s shadow fleet solved the sanctions problem because sanctions are fundamentally bureaucratic. It cannot solve Hormuz because geography is physical. Vortexa identified 27 sanctioned tankers sitting off Sri Lanka in ballast because they could not return to Iran to reload. Meanwhile, Iranian crude has been accumulating on the other side. Iran has the oil. China wants the oil. Yet the transaction cannot be completed because the physical connection between buyer and seller has been severed.

China had been Iran’s escape valve. When Europe stopped purchasing Iranian crude and Western financial institutions refused to process transactions, Chinese refiners simply bought discounted Iranian barrels. Iran received foreign currency, China received cheap energy, and Washington discovered that it could make the trade inconvenient without eliminating it. Now even that system is breaking down. Iranian crude stored afloat fell from around 135 million barrels to 107 million barrels during August as accessible inventories were drained while oil accumulated behind the blockade.

This is far more serious than another round of sanctions. Sanctions are economic warfare through banking regulations. A blockade is economic warfare enforced by military power. Iran depends upon oil revenue for foreign currency, and that lifeline is being severed while its domestic economy is already collapsing. GDP contracted 10.1% in the first quarter, while the oil and gas sector plunged more than 26%. Remove the dollars and yuan coming into the country while production is falling and Tehran faces declining reserves, additional pressure on the rial, and still more inflation.

Iran is attempting to redirect commerce over LAND, but the economics are absurd. Before the war, more than 80% of Iran’s roughly 180 million tonnes of annual two-way trade moved by sea from its southern coast. The Financial Times reports that trade is increasingly being pushed toward Turkey and neighboring countries, with Iranian imports through the Gürbulak crossing reportedly surging 250%. But you cannot replace a supertanker with trucks. Thousands of trucks mean bottlenecks, customs delays, fuel expenses, labor costs, and a fraction of the capacity available through maritime trade.

The blockade could also damage Iran long after the immediate crisis passes. Oil cannot be pumped indefinitely when storage tanks and tankers are full. Production eventually has to be reduced, and shutting aging fields creates additional costs and technical problems when production is restarted. Iran therefore risks losing not merely today’s oil sale but future productive capacity.

Washington has discovered the limitation of sanctions: they require other people to cooperate. China did not care that Washington wanted Iranian oil removed from the market. Traders made fortunes circumventing restrictions, and every new sanction produced another method of avoiding the previous one. A blockade does not require the buyer to cooperate, which is precisely why it works. But that is also what makes it infinitely more dangerous.

China loses access to discounted crude, Iranian production declines, global supply tightens, tankers are rerouted, insurance premiums rise, and commerce is forced onto inefficient routes. The blockade may be economically effective, but effectiveness and strategic wisdom are not necessarily the same thing. Once warships physically determine who may participate in international commerce, we have moved beyond conventional sanctions and into the militarization of trade itself.

Iran survived sanctions because markets found another path around Washington. The blockade is working because that path has now been physically blocked. That is a far more powerful weapon, but it also represents another escalation from financial warfare toward actual war. Markets can circumvent politicians, banks, regulations, and sanctions. They cannot circumvent geography.

Sep 28 2026

The Persian Gulf & Garden of Eden


Posted originally on Sep 28, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |

Sumerian ziggurat of Ur

QUESTION: I believe you once said that 2032 would be the half-cycle of 4300 years from the Persian conquest of the city of Ur, which prompted Abraham to migrate to Canaan, and that 8600 years ago was the time of Noah and the great flood. Do I remember that correctly?

Ellis

ECO31857 Current

ANSWER: As far as the cycles are concerned, around 6500BC corresponds to th full cycle of 8600 years back from 2032. The story of the Great Flood exists in many cultures in the West as well as in Asia. The Hindu tradition features the story of Manu, who is warned by a fish (often an avatar of Vishnu) to build a boat and survive a great deluge, similar to other flood narratives. I would suspect that it was not simply rain for 40 days and nights.

For such a major event some have argued perhaps there was a meteor that his the earth. They do know that it has been hypothesized that an impact event created the Burckle Crater in the Indian Ocean. However, its proposed date is disputed with some claiming it was round 2800BC. It would logically assumed that a meteor impacting in the ocean would cause a massive tidal wave that could be a sudden flood type scenario.

A specific archaeological claim from the 1920s, by Sir Leonard Woolley who excavated a thick layer of river silt at the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia, which he dated to around 6500 years ago (roughly 4500 BC), and famously declared it evidence of Noah’s flood . What we do know is that the Egyptian inscription on the Merneptah Stele (c. 1207 BC) contains the earliest known reference to “Israel.” It mentions Israel as a people already living in Canaan, which some argue supports an earlier Exodus. This Egyptian victory monument provides the crucial textual anchor. Pharaoh Merneptah boasts: “Israel is laid waste, its seed is no more.” This single line tells us there was a group called “Israel” that already existed in Canaan. That takes us back about 3200 years.

Mesopotamia is called the “Cradle of Civilization” because it is one of the earliest places on Earth where humans transitioned from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to settled, complex urban societies. Located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (in modern-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey), it saw the emergence of many “firsts” that laid the foundation for later civilizations. It gave rise to some of the world’s earliest known cities, including Uruk, Ur, and Eridu. By around 4000–3500 BC, Uruk had grown into a massive urban center with thousands of inhabitants, monumental architecture, and specialized labor—features that define a civilization. It is the City of Ur from which Abraham migrated and became the father of the Jews and Arabs.

Persian Gulf

The Persian Gulf did not form in a single earthquake, but through a slow geological process driven by plate tectonics and sea-level changes. From a cyclical perspective, the last glacial maximum occurred around 18,000 years ago. Global sea level is believed to have been about 130 meters lower than it is today. Over the next 12,000 years, most of the ice melted off Canada and Scandinavia, causing sea level to rise and flooding the rims of all the dry lands. Some attributed this to the legendary Noah’s Flood. However, this may have been loosely connected, but that is far from certain.

Geologists agree that the Persian Gulf was formed by the collision of the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates, a process that has been ongoing for millions of years. For roughly 40 million years, the Arabian Plate has slowly rotated and moved northward, colliding with the Eurasian Plate. This collision crumpled the edge of the Eurasian Plate, creating the Zagros Mountains in Iran.

As the Arabian Plate pushed into the Eurasian Plate, the crust in the region was depressed and warped, creating a shallow, flooded basin. This basin is the Persian Gulf. The Gulf is essentially a tectonic depression, not a rift valley formed by a single earthquake.

Sea-level rise after the last Ice Age drove the basin’s final flooding. About 11,000 to 14,000 years ago, melting ice sheets caused global sea levels to rise significantly. This allowed water from the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman to flow over the low-lying land and fill the basin, creating the modern Persian Gulf.

While the Persian Gulf’s formation is a geological fact, the idea that it is linked to Noah’s Flood comes from a scientific hypothesis that some researchers have proposed, not a proven connection. Some researchers have argued that the source of ancient flood stories. An ancient Babylonian map depicts Babylonia as being surrounded and submerged by the waters of the Persian Gulf, which some scholars have connected to the flood stories. Additionally, a geological study found evidence of a massive storm or flood in the Persian Gulf around 6,800 years ago, and some suggest it might correspond to the story of Noah, though this remains a hypothesis.

Great Flood

Other scholars argue that the biblical Flood was a regional event in Mesopotamia (the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), not a global flood. The Persian Gulf basin, which once connected the Tigris and Euphrates rivers before sea levels rose, is one proposed location for the “Eden” described in Genesis. There are even surviving depictions of the Great Flood with bodies and fish.

Babylonian Tablets Noah Ark

In ancient Mesopotamian stories, the city of Dilmun was the blessed, pure land where the flood survivor was taken to live forever. In the Sumerian flood story, the hero (known as Ziusudra) is granted eternal life by the gods and settled in a distant, sacred place. The text explicitly names this location as it is the Garden of Eden.

Septimus Severus 193 211AD AE8 Assaria os Apameis Phrygia Story of Noah

This story of Noah even appears on a Roman coin struck by Septimius Severus (193-211AD) long before Christianity became really a growing religion in Rome. The story is illustrated and even the name Noah appears on the Roman coin. This tends to verify that the story was well known outside of the Bible. The location there is called Noah’s National Park.

Phrygia Map
Philip I Noah Story AE Phrugia

Here is a later Roman Emperor, Philip I (244-249AD), with another coin issued om Phrygia from the area where the story of Noah’s arc landed. The story has also been recorded in that region of Turkey on ancient Roman Coins. This has long raised independent evidence for the “story” of Noah external from the Bible, which the academics seem to go out of their way to discredit as history. The depiction of Noah on Roman coins struck in Phrygia come from the very area where Noah’s Ark was supposed to have rested. This demonstrates that this story comes from the very place where Noah’s Ark came to rest.

Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot at Gordium, which was the ancient capital of Phrygia, located in what is now central Turkey. The prophecy held that whoever loosened the knot would rule Asia, which Alexander went on to do. Historically, this was an important area.

The Persian Gulf is about  35 miles wide (56 km) at its narrowest, in the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf is very shallow, with a maximum depth of 90 meters (295 feet) and an average depth of 50 meters (164 feet). The Persian Gulf was fertile dry land before the flood, which obviously contains very old cultures which may be older than anything known on dry land today. We do know that the Gulf has receded from where it once stood in ancient times following the flooding.

Garden of Eden

Garden of Eden

The legend of Dilmun (Telmun) is fascinating. It comes from Sumerian writings. This was an ancient Semitic-speaking city that is mentioned from the 3rd millennium BC onwards. Based on the records that have survived, Dilmun was located in the Persian Gulf. It was on a trade route between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization. Dilmun was a major trading center which controlled the Persian Gulf trading routes. Dilmun was mentioned by the Mesopotamians as a trade partner and the major source of copper.

Ruins in Bahrain
Ancient ruins at Bahrain Fort. A UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Middle East

There are two official letters from Dilmun dated about 1370 BC that were recovered from Nippur, during the Kassite dynasty of Babylon. There was some administrative relationship between Dilmun and Babylon at that time. There is also an early inscription that mentions Dilmun and speaks of the tribute that they brought to Ur-Nanshe, the first king of the first dynasty of Lagash, which was an ancient city located northwest of the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Lagash (modern Al-Hiba) was one of the oldest cities of the Ancient Near East. The surviving inscriptions say:

“The ships of Dilmun from foreign lands, brought him (Ur-Nanshe) wood as a tribute.”

Kassite dynasty conquered and controlled Babylon between 1531 BC and until c. 1155 BC. After their collapse, the only mention of Dilmun comes from Assyrian inscriptions dated around 1150 BC which proclaimed the Assyrian king to be king of Dilmun as well.

Dilmun was a civilization that was quite an old civilization, yet because it appears to have been submerged in the Persian Gulf, it is much less famous than the four cradles of the civilization of the Old World, i.e. Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilization, and the Yellow River Civilization.

In literature, Dilmun occupies an important place in the mythology of Mesopotamia since it is in the second half of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Additionally, Dilmun is also mentioned in the myth of Enki and Ninhursag / Ninhursaja. In this story, Dilmun is presented as a sort of earthly paradise – the Garden of Eden where survivors of the Great Flood started over.

Archaeology has confirmed that Dilmun was a real, thriving civilization centered on modern-day Bahrain and parts of the eastern Arabian coast. It was a prosperous Bronze Age trading hub, famous for its sweet-water springs, date palms, and its role as a commercial entrepôt between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley.

The Mesopotamians idealized Dilmun in their mythology as a pure, holy land—a virtual Garden of Eden where sickness and death did not exist. This literary image was likely inspired by the real island’s abundant fresh water and lush vegetation, which would have seemed miraculous to travelers from arid Mesopotamia.

Categories:Middle EastReligion

Sep 26 2026

When Did a Military Coup Become Acceptable in America?


Posted originally on Sep 25, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sep 26 2026

Milei Takes on “Arrogant Parasites” at United Nations


Posted originally on Sep 25, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sep 26 2026

AI the Real Danger?


Posted originally on Sep 25, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |

Recursive AI

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

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

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

Ukraine Humanoid Soldiers

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

Categories:AI Computers

Sep 26 2026

Interview from Spain


Posted originally on Sep 26, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |

Categories:Armstrong in the Media

Sep 26 2026

FOLLOW ARMSTRONG ECONOMICS


Posted originally on Sep 26, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |

armstrong social media promo wordpress v2

Endless fraudulent accounts are popping up across social media platforms. Please note that the accounts listed above are the only REAL Armstrong platforms. 

Sep 26 2026

Putin & Trump


Posted Originally on Sep 26, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |

Putin and Trump

QUESTION: Do you believe that Trump is afraid of Putin because he has dirt on him?

Jake

FSA 1 Two Pages
FSA 2

ANSWER: That is just absurd. I was summoned to what I was told would be a briefing on Russia. I was surprised, because they obviously knew my position right down to who and how the war started. I took my assistant with me, then she had to step out of the room. I was then told they agreed. We would NOT be at war with Russia. Then they asked me to write the peace proposal and to use my back channels to get it to Putin.

Since I was in the middle of the attempt regime change that the bankers & Neocons were conducting and I refused to put in the $10 billion to fund Hermitage Capital Management that Putin eventually confiscated, he knew I was not part of that operation. The letter from the Japanese government asked to confirm I deposited $10 billion. Republic assumed I took the $10 billion, told them it was not with them. So, they ran to the DOJ and told them they had no idea with te money was and then pocketed the $1 billion that was there. I believe it was the Federal Reserve that went back and asked to confirm $10 billion. That use to be a lot of money back then.

HSBC Gag Cover
Republic Pays 606 WSJ

That is when 13 days later the revision took place – sorry $1 billion. The bank could not then put the money back and tried to pocket the money blaming me. But you cannot get $1 billion out of a bank and nobody knows where is went. That can only be by wire. That’s when the bank had the DOJ impose a gag order on me to stop me from helping my clients who sued the bank and the bank finally pled guilty and returned the money. It is interesting how mainstream media prefers to cover everything up rather than ever report the truth on so many levels.

Trump Responds 1 15 26

I guess I was called in for I was told sorry what happened, but it gave me more credibility with Putin. So, I wrote the plan, laid out the truth, and got it to Putin’s desk. I asked if this was sanctioned, and I was told yes. A few weeks later, I got a letter from President Trump thanking me. This whole thing about Putin has something on Trump is absurd. These people have ZERO idea of what is taking place behind the curtain and Gold help us if they ever reported the truth. Their heads would probably spin around like in the OMEN.

Russia_Peace_Deal Cover
Epstein 2019

I had another briefing, I was asked about Epstein and who he was working for. I said Mosad. They said you are correct. What they did not know is that Robert Maxwell had funded the coup against Gorbachev and when that failed, he wanted Israel to cover his losses so he would not have to testify regarding THE CLUB. He suddenly fell off his yacht and forgot how to swim. There was NO WAY Epstring would get a trial. It was not the girls or even the guys he entrapped. The real question the media will never even address is who was he working for. That leads to the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, which brought Yeltsin to power, so they then blackmailed Yeltsin with Bank of New York, and then Yeltsin turned to Putin and his last words were “Protect Mother Russia.” That is just scratching the surface that NO main stream media will ever touch. This would lead to a host of other things from The Club where his mysterious money came from.

Their version of the free press is to call everything a conspiracy theory so they do not have to get into the facts, and de-platform anyone they do not like.

McCain Magnitsky

People have no idea about the truth of what has been taking place behind the curtain. Magnitsky was NOT a lawyer, he was the accountant for Hermitage Capital Management that they wanted me to put in $10 billion run by Bill Browder and Edmond Safra. He was NOT killed by Putin. That was all a lie. He would have been the star witness to the whole regime change attempt.

Alex Nekrasov was a anti-Putin film maker. They used him thinking he would create the propaganda film they wanted to cover everything up. When Alex began, the lies began to surface that he could not ignore. He was then told he should meet me. We met in the Frankfurt Airport. Because his film told the truth, thy did everything to ban it.

Magnitsky Act Behind the Scenes

Sep 24 2026

Iran Is Watching Its Economy Collapse in Real Time


Posted Originally on Sep 24, 2026 by Martin Armstrong

Iran's Rial Currency Falls to Near-Record Lows on European 'Snapback' Sanctions Threat

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

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

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

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

Current series of Iranian Rial : r/Banknotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sep 24 2026

One Hostage and One Million People Will Pay?


Posted Originally on Sep 24, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |

Israeli Defense Minister Issues Ultimatum to Hamas: Accept US Ceasefire Deal or Face “Total Destruction”

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has now said something that should disturb anyone. According to The Jerusalem Post, Katz threatened to destroy what remains of Gaza City and forcibly evacuate around ONE MILLION Palestinians if Hamas takes a single Israeli hostage. Think about what is being said. One person is captured and a million people may be driven from their homes while what remains of their city is destroyed. The Jerusalem Post itself acknowledged that such a statement could make Israel’s defense against genocide and war crimes accusations at The Hague more difficult because international law requires proportionality.

This is precisely why international humanitarian law prohibits COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that no protected person may be punished for an offense he or she did not personally commit. Collective penalties and measures of intimidation are prohibited. This principle exists because humanity has already traveled down this road. Governments cannot punish an entire village, city, ethnic population, or civilian society because one person or armed organization committed an offense. Otherwise there is no law of war. There is merely vengeance.

There is also a serious distinction between hostage taking and the capture of an enemy combatant during warfare. Israel deems taken soldiers “hostages” rather than “prisoners of war.” The Geneva Conventions contain an entire framework governing prisoners of war and people detained during armed conflict. The ICRC makes clear that POWs and other wartime detainees are protected by international humanitarian law. Hostage taking is prohibited, but so is collective punishment.

If Hamas deliberately seizes a civilian to compel Israel to act, that can constitute hostage taking. If a combatant is captured during hostilities, the legal analysis is different and depends upon the nature of the conflict and the person’s status. Governments cannot simply erase the laws governing wartime detention by changing the vocabulary.

Consider the scale of what Katz has threatened. Gaza today contains roughly two million people. Katz threatened to extinguish roughly HALF of the entire population of Gaza. He did not say he would punish the people responsible. He threatened to destroy what remains of their city and remove approximately one million human beings.

People seem to misunderstand what genocide actually means under international law. You do not have to exterminate every member of an ethnic or national population before the word becomes legally relevant. The Genocide Convention covers acts committed with the specific intent to destroy a protected group “in whole or in part,” and international courts have interpreted that “part” as having to be substantial. Numbers matter, but so does the significance of the population being targeted and the evidence concerning intent.

Look at Srebrenica. More than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered while the wider Muslim population was forcibly removed from the enclave. International tribunals concluded that genocide had occurred even though the victims represented only a fraction of Bosnia’s entire Muslim population. The courts looked at the targeted community, the killings, the expulsions and what those actions demonstrated about the intent to destroy that community.

Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that people cannot be punished for offenses they did not personally commit and expressly prohibits collective penalties. Article 49 prohibits mass forcible transfers from occupied territory except under narrow circumstances involving civilian security or imperative military necessity, with additional protections and an obligation to return evacuees when hostilities cease.

What offense did the millionth Palestinian commit because Hamas captured one Israeli? What did the infant do? What did the grandmother do? What did the family hiding inside a damaged apartment building do? Nothing. That is the entire reason the prohibition against collective punishment exists.

The Jerusalem Post itself recognized the problem, warning that Katz’s statement could make it harder for Israeli lawyers defending the state against genocide and war-crimes allegations in The Hague. When your own defense minister is publicly threatening the destruction of what remains of a city and displacement on a scale approaching half of Gaza’s population in retaliation for one hostage, those words do not simply disappear when lawyers walk into an international courtroom.

Israel maintains that its operations are directed against Hamas rather than Palestinians as a protected group, and that distinction is central to whether genocide could ultimately be proven. Genocide requires specific intent, which is a demanding legal standard, but governments rarely hand prosecutors a document explicitly announcing such an intention. Courts instead examine statements by officials alongside patterns of conduct, the scale and systematic nature of the acts, treatment of civilians, destruction of civilian life, forced displacement, and the surrounding circumstances to determine whether the required intent can be established.

One million Palestinians cannot collectively kidnap one Israeli, nor can one million people become collectively guilty because of the actions of Hamas. That is the entire point of international humanitarian law. Once any government claims the right to destroy a city or uproot an enormous civilian population in retaliation for the conduct of somebody else, it is no longer talking merely about defeating the people responsible for an attack. It is openly threatening consequences against people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the offense, and international law was written precisely because mankind already knows where that logic can lead.