QUESTION: Were the Crusades inspired by economics? You mentioned how Venice looted Constantinople. Thank you for making history interesting KR ANSWER: To understand the Crusades, we have to first look at what was the original justification. The Catholic Church encouraged pilgrimages from the 4th century, but they began really during the 1st-2nd century and built in […]

  IBM has been working on what we call Conversational AI. When I was working on developing Socrates’ Natural Language, I was not interested in creating a machine to debate me. I was interested in creating a machine that I could at least have a conversation with. I teamed up with Dragon Systems back then […]

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; The Romans seem to have issued coins to celebrate everything. Did they ever issue coins celebrating the Christian persecutions? ZR ANSWER: Oh yes. The coin above celebrates precisely that — the Christian persecutions. There was a major active campaign of persecuting the Christians during the 3rd century as the barbarians were storming the […]

  QUESTION: Sir; I have noticed that the Roman and Greek hoards of coins you have offered are silver. You do not offer hoards of bronze coins. I have two questions. First, are broze hoards less common? Second, why have you been a buyer of large hoards to begin with? Thank you LW ANSWER: There […]

Some people think that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is leading the polls in Mexico, is their answer to Trump. This is once again the constant trend of trying to blame Trump for everything. In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power and Mao Zedong rose in China. At the same time, we saw Franklin Roosevelt take office after […]

QUESTION: You seem to be somewhere between left and right-believing in government restraint and showing that it pursues its own self-interest which leads to corruption and in the end the fall of the state. Is that a fair statement of your philosophy? KP ANSWER:  I am against the Marxist views and I am against the […]

Good to see a healthy rebound in todays Asian markets with strong performances across the board. It still appears however, that the market is not that confident that the US and China have settled for the moment as the Shanghai bounced just +0.3% and Hang Seng +0.75%. It was a different storey for countries with […]

Asian markets did not bode well today, especially after the late sell-off in core US indices. Core Shanghai did attempt an initial rally, but could not find the momentum as Hong Kong sank. Just to close small down was an achievement given the surrounding circumstances. The Hang Seng lost 1% as Tech, Real estate and […]

  Interesting the price action in Asia following yesterdays events and action. The Nikkei was the only core market to record a positive return today, but probably weighted by the currency decline and safety boost. The Japanese index made steady progress throughout the day to close at the high, which was the complete opposite to […]

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; There are these people so desperate to argue that cryptocurrency will change the world, I have heard the same pitch behind gold and I suspect most are just goldbugs who gave up and moved to cryptocurrencies. The same arguments of fiat and central banks are at the base of this as well. […]