Martin Armstrong Is The Most Important Person You've Never Heard Of
In late 2018, a few surprising things happened. The Philadelphia Eagles, who had never won a Super Bowl and were using their backup quarterback, unseated the five-time champion New England Patriots, defeating both the only five time Super Bowl quarterback in history and probably the best coaching duo in the NFL. Also, the stock market dropped almost 2,000 points in two days, and then bounced like a yo-yo, confusing every pundit on TV and radio, most of whom simply shrugged and said, "It’s just markets."
However, there was a man to whom neither of these events was a surprise. In fact, he discussed the probability of both of them on his public blog, which is read by thousands of people every day. The same man has accurately predicted major economic and world events for the better part of the last four decades. But don’t look for him on CNBC, and don’t expect to hear Kai Ryssdal interview him on NPR's Marketplace. In fact, even though a full length feature documentary about him has been released to theatrical audiences worldwide, the vast majority of people have never heard of him.
This man’s name is Martin Armstrong. The fact that he is never mentioned by the mainstream media, despite his enormous audience and unrivaled string of accurate predictions, is all the proof you need to indict and convict modern journalism of the crime of irrelevance.
Armstrong is no mystic soothsayer. He is a hard-nosed computer scientist, trader and historian, who was once regularly featured in magazines like Bloomberg and The New Yorker. Unlike other analysts, who always inject their personal opinion and biases into their predictions, Armstrong relies on the calculations of a proprietary AI that he developed himself. He calls it Socrates.
Socrates is not your typical computer program. After it accurately predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, and several currency collapses during the 1980s, the US government demanded that Armstrong hand over the source code. He refused, so they seized it by force. Recognizing what was happening, the program deleted itself, leaving the government's computer forensic specialists baffled.
After arresting Armstrong on utterly groundless accusations of securities fraud, the government held him without trial for 10 years. He was told that if he revealed where he was hiding the source code, he would be released. He refused. He survived an assassination attempt while in prison, and shared a cell with terrorists and murderers.
When his friends in high places managed to get his case on the docket of the US Supreme Court, all charges against Armstrong suddenly dropped, and he was released. No trial, no press, and certainly no apology. 10 years of his life gone, simply because he didn’t think the government could be trusted to safeguard his software. Armstrong believes to this day that the reason he was released was so that the government could avoid the public scrutiny that would accompany a Supreme Court hearing.
While every other Internet investment authority sells a newsletter, a subscription service of some kind, or some other product, Armstrong has posted information publicly on his blog Armstrong Economics for years. By his own admission, he has more money than he can spend in his lifetime, and his goal is simply for his knowledge and work not to die with him.
In a nutshell, Armstrong’s system is based on the fact that everything in nature appears in repeating patterns and cycles. In chaos theory, this is the concept that allows physicists to draw diagrams that predict the growth patterns of phenomena from cells all the way up to galaxies. In the case of Armstrong‘s computer, Socrates takes massive amounts of historical data, and uses it to extrapolate likely outcomes of future events, from disease outbreaks to directional changes in the stock market.
It sounds like science fiction, but Armstrong has a 40 year track record that proves it is very real.
In the case of the Eagles, after acknowledging that he had never fed football data into Socrates, and was essentially doing a back of the envelope calculation, Armstrong published this on February 4:
"Another very interesting factor is that the first time the Eagles made it to the Superbowl was 1981. That means, 2018 is also 37 years for them. Combined with the Pi Cycle from the Patriot’s first time appearing in a Superbowl, strongly infers that this is a truly important cyclical convergence. At least cyclically, both teams were spot on to be in the Superbowl. That is very interesting from a forecasting perspective. This much was cyclically determined.
"Therefore, the only thing we can conclude from this analysis, lacking a real solid database, is to extract risk inferences. In other words, there is clearly a RISK that the Patriots will LOSE and the Eagles could actually win using several converging cyclical references."
Regarding the stock market, Armstrong was much more confident, since he had data from Socrates to work from. This is what he wrote.
"On the weekend, Socrates came up with a new pattern announcement on the Yearly Level no less. It posted: 'Important High Waterfall Likely.' I warned at the WEC that 2018 was a Panic Cycle Year and we are witnessing that forecast live and in person. Today penetrated the January low and we closed below it. We closed below the last two Daily Bearish and in fact we FAILED to close above the What-If Daily Bullish Reversal. We did just slightly crack the 24000 level and this was rather important. Despite all of this, gold crashed last Friday and could not even manage to post any respectful gains given the meltdown in the Dow.
"Our Directional Changes now coming into play for the next two days and then it looks like an opposite move into Friday 9th. We are now playing with the monthly level of support under the 23000 level. Nothing has changed long-term, but the volatility is increasing sharply and this is a Panic Cycle Year. It appears that we are extending the cycle so we do not expect this target we had in the 25,000-28,000 level to remain as the major high. This will clearly undermine people's confidence and it may send more capital into the waiting arms of government hawking their bonds.
"We elected the last two Daily Bearish and avoided the Bullish, but the closing at 24,345.75 is below our opening projection for tomorrow at 24,411. Opening beneath that tomorrow implies new lows but we do not expect to breach the Monthly Support zone in the mid 22,000 level. Our What-IF Bullish Reversals for tomorrow assuming a new low will be 24872 and 24689.
"The Weekly Bearish lies at 23250 and by Friday we need a closing back above 24745 to imply this week’s low would hold. Keep in mind this is a PANIC CYCLE, and that warns that while it may look dark and grim right now, play it by the numbers for this thing can then swing and turn violently back up after creating a BEAR TRAP.
"The next two Daily Bearish Reversals in the Dow lie at 25308 and 24765. This is accompanied by the Weekly Bearish at 24741 and 24695. The week to pay attention will be that of February 19th followed by the week of March 5th. The Italian election the 4th of March 2018. In third place remains the left-of-centre Democratic Party (PD), which runs the current government. Here Matteo Renzi and his party have collapsed in the polls, in part because of the fading popularity of the EU. There remains a significant risk that the anti-EU position of the Italians has risen to a significant level that once again we are witnessing a backlash against the current political systems everywhere.
"January should have been a high and we have been warning for months that a January high points ideally to a March low.
"This DOES NOT appear to be a Crash like 1987. Back then, we elected all FOUR Weekly Bearish Reversals in the 7th week from the high all in one week! We elected the first TWO Daily Bearish on day 5 from the high. It was day 36 from the high that finally elected all FOUR Daily Bearish Reversals. Here we elected the first TWO Daily Bearish Reversals on day 4 from the high. Being slightly ahead of the 1987 CRASH tends to infer that it will be short-lived."
Beyond the calculations of events, Armstrong’s analysis on government policy, climate change, and cultural shifts are all mind blowing. For example, he pointed out that young women of the millennial generation are giving up on boys their own age, and are looking to marry older, more established and financially secure partners, well in advance of the trend becoming publicly known. To Armstrong, this is regression to the historical mean. Young women want partners who will be able to provide for them and their children. It’s not sexism, it’s millennia of evolution.
On a different subject, while the mainstream press was telling everyone that the earth was going to overheat from global warming, Armstrong stated that the thermodynamic cycle of the sun was actually entering a diminishing phase, and that we would be experiencing more severe extremes of weather, analogous to the mini Ice Age that struck in the 1700s. Putting his money where his mouth was, Armstrong moved to Florida, well in advance of the winter storms that crippled much of the United States over the past three years.
In a sane world, Martin Armstrong’s name would be as familiar as any global leader, or at least the chair of the Federal Reserve. He has even released a set of recommendations for the federal government, that would allow them to solve their $20 trillion debt, while ending the income tax. Unfortunately, things are the way they are, because the people in charge like it that way. Armstrong’s brand of non-partisan iconoclasm doesn’t serve either the left or the right, so they all ignore him. The majority of alternative economics sites are mainly focused around advocates of gold bullion or cryptocurrency, both of which Armstrong has criticized, so they ignore him as well.
If you are interested in the thinking outside the box, and not in hearing the same narrative on every channel of your media stream, do yourself a favor and check out Armstrong‘s blog. Since the media blackout on him doesn’t have an end in sight, I am going to make a point of covering more of his insights on this blog.
