The Forecaster

Martin Armstrong was for years a financial adviser well known around Wall Street, who claimed to forecast economic turning points with a model built on the number pi. In 1999 the FBI arrived at his door and he was charged with a fraud running to billions of dollars. He spent more than a decade in prison, much of that time for refusing to comply with a court order. Armstrong still rejects the charge and argues that he was jailed for what he was saying. Marcus Vetter and Karin Steinberger's 2014 documentary largely adopts that account, and critics found it one-sided. The forecasting method based on pi is not an approach that has found acceptance among economists either.