The year is 2012: Europe is stumbling from one emergency summit to the next, America has gone crashing through the 15-trillion-dollar debt ceiling, people are taking to the streets across the world because they have realised that something has been thrown off kilter; that the banks have spiralled out of control; that governments have lost their grip on public debt. And after eleven years off the radar, a man resurfaces in Philadelphia, a man who used a computer model and the number pi in the nineties to predict economic turning points with astounding precision: Martin Armstrong predicted the exact date of the October crash in 1987, the decline in the value of the dollar in 1986, the demise of the Japanese bull market in 1990 and the Nikkei crash in 1989. He was one of the most expensive Wall Street market analysts and was named economist of the decade and fund manager of the year in 1998.
This documentary film portrays a man returning to his life after eleven years in prison. It follows him as he meets his old partners for the first time and depicts his first public speech to people who are still prepared to travel from across the globe and pay handsome sums to hear him speak. It is a film about a man who claims he could transform the world economy’s superstructure and thus prevent a global Armageddon.
Martin Armstrong refused to play along with the bankers’ game and warned his customers that “the club” were manipulating currency and silver markets. He quickly made powerful enemies: New York investment bankers, hedge funds managers, Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs. The FBI and SEC, the US Securities and the Exchange Commission started to show interest in his computer model. In 1999 he was arrested on charges of fraud which he still disputes to this day. He was incarcerated for seven years for contempt of court. After time in solitary confinement and threats against his mother, he signed a partial confession and was sentenced to a further four years. Armstrong says he no longer fears death after everything he has experienced over the last eleven years. Give me liberty or give me death – there is no middle road. Martin Armstrong wants to leave America, the country that calls itself the land of the free, yet imprisons more of its own citizens than any other: America.
