News Aggregation

The WEC Real Estate Report is in your Portal. This report includes the account of how real estate survived the German Hyperinflation and the real social implications. Understanding that not everyone survived is critical to understand. It was that event which has dominated European Political Philosophy to this day right down to austerity and the refusal to bailout banks. This report covers the regions shifts within the US economy and provides an overview for Europe. This report will be available for $300 after the Conference for non-attendees.  

What if the economy wasn’t chaotic at all-but followed a hidden code? The Armstrong Economic Code reveals the powerful cyclical patterns discovered by legendary forecaster Martin A. Armstrong, whose Economic Confidence Model (ECM) has predicted every major boom, bust, and geopolitical shift for more than four decades. Compiled and expanded by Kerry Lutz, host of the Financial Survival Network and longtime student of Armstrong’s work, this definitive edition connects the dots between history, markets, and the rhythm of human behavior. From the rise and fall of empires to the digital age of algorithmic finance, the Code shows how every crisis-and every recovery-follows a pattern few understand but everyone feels. Whether you’re an investor, policymaker, or simply trying to navigate a world of chaos, The Armstrong Economic Code gives you the tools to see what’s coming next-and why the future was already written in the past. Inside you’ll discover: – The 8.6-year Economic Confidence Model and how it pinpoints global turning points – How capital flows reveal the next great migration of wealth and power – Why governments always collapse in predictable cycles of confidence and corruption – Exclusive post-2020 commentary and charts expanding on The World According to Martin Armstrong – How to interpret Armstrong’s forecasts to protect and grow your wealth This is not a biography, and not a technical manual. It is the missing bridge between everyday investors and the powerful ideas behind Socrates. Readers are already calling it “the clearest explanation of Martin’s worldview ever put into print.” ? Order the book here: https://amzn.to/4nTZ3Hq (Available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook)

The Roots of Tulip Mania So, what is the story with the tulip mania? Well, as some may be aware, the tulip is a national symbol of the Netherlands. The country is affectionately known by some as “the flower shop of the world.” If you’ve ever been to the Netherlands, you’ve probably seen some or visited some of the beautifully cultivated fields of colorful tulips lining the landscape of the Dutch countryside. There are countless tulip museums and tulip festivals are still celebrated annually throughout the country. The Dutch people even took their love of tulips abroad when emigrating from their homeland, starting up tulip festivals in places like New York (which Holland.com points out was originally known as New Amsterdam) and in the town aptly named Holland located in the U.S. state of Michigan. Despite this near obsession with tulips, the flower is not native to the Netherlands. They are actually native to the Pamir and Tan Shan mountain ranges located in Central Asia primarily in modern-day Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. They were brought to the Netherlands in the late-16th century from the Ottoman Empire where the flower had been cultivated for decades prior. A botanist by the name of Carolus Clusius who in the 1590s had begun an important botanical garden at the University of Leiden, was one of the first to really pioneer the cultivation of tulips in the Netherlands. He had his own private garden in which he planted numerous bright and beautiful tulips and devoted much of his later life to studying the tulip and the mysterious phenomenon known as tulip breaking. Tulip Breaking and the Allure of the Diseased Bloom Tulip breaking is key to the story of the tulip mania. It was a strange occurrence in which the petal colors of the flower suddenly changed into multicolored patterns. Many years later it turned out that these strange looking tulips were actually the result of a virus that had infected them. Nonetheless, these essentially diseased multicolored tulips did nothing but serve to ramp up the tulip craze further. The mesmerizing diseased tulips became even more valuable than the uninfected ones and Dutch botanists began to compete with each other to cultivate new hybrid and more beautiful varieties of tulips. These became known as “cultivars” and would be traded among a small group of botanists and other flower aficionados. As time passed, the trade grew out from the group and botanists began to receive requests from people they did not know for not only the flowers, but the bulbs and seeds in exchange for money. Tulip brokerages began to open up and what was originally a “gentlemanly pursuit” turned into an all-out war for profits. A Golden Age for Trade — and Speculation Part of what helped this interest in Tulips grow, along with people’s willingness to exchange money for them, was the fact that the Netherlands in the early part of the 1600s had become the richest country in Europe mostly through trade. During this Dutch Golden Age, not only were there aristocrats with money, but middle-class merchants, artisans and tradesmen also found themselves with extra coin burning a hole in their pockets. Basically, this meant more people were able to spend money on luxuries such as cultivars that perhaps in other European countries would not have been commonplace. Besides the fact that people had money up and down the social class structure, the Netherlands and specifically Amsterdam already had robust trading platforms. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange opened in 1602 and the Baltic Grain Trade, an informal futures market itself, had begun decades earlier. The Netherlands was therefore primed for a new trade, which was to become Tulip Mania. The Bubble Inflates Tulips became the talk of the fledgling Dutch Republic.  “Neighbors seemed to talk to neighbors; colleagues with colleagues; shopkeepers, booksellers, bakers, and doctors with their clients gives one the sense of a community gripped, for a time, by this new fascination and enthralled by a sudden vision of its profitability,” wrote Anne Goldgar in Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age.  By the 1620s, prices were already rising to incredible levels. One story in particular was of an entire townhouse offered in exchange for just 10 bulbs of the very special cultivar, Semper Augustus (shown to the right), that had petals that looked a bit like a candy cane. Although the offer of an entire house for just 10 bulbs was incredible in its own right, the fact that the offer was rejected outlines just how much these flowers were considered to be worth at the time. In the years that followed it became more and more apparent that the tulip bulbs themselves were going for more money than the actual bloomed flowers. Speculators piled into the markets like wildfire, trading the bulbs rather than the flowers, which resulted in what you might call a futures market. By 1633, rather than bother with guilders, the Dutch even began using the bulbs as a currency themselves. There are numerous records of land properties being sold for bulbs. At the time, guilders and florins referred to the same Dutch currency and were used interchangeably throughout the 17th century. As word spread that one could make ridiculous sums of money simply by buying and selling the bulbs, prices skyrocketed even higher. According to the BBC, in 1633 a single bulb of Semper Augustus was worth 5,500 guilders. 4 years later in 1637, the sum had nearly doubled to 10,000 guilders. A bulb worth 10,000 guilders in 1637 would be roughly equivalent to €100,000–€120,000 today. You may be wondering what a guilder is—the guilder was the Dutch currency up until the adoption of the Euro. Having said that, to put the above numbers into perspective, according to Mike Dash who wrote Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused, “It was enough to feed, clothe and house a whole Dutch family for half a lifetime, or sufficient to purchase one