Economic Advice by Martin Armstrong

Martin Armstrong so thoroughly discredits himself in many blog posts, only a complete idiot would take any of his advice.

Take for example his ideas on food security:

Local Food a Good Idea for Economic Freedom 

Posted Feb 5, 2016 by Martin Armstrong
Sorry for the typo, this is a good idea for those who want to look at having a back-up for the future. But this idea should also be taken seriously in places that need to import food. The number one reason politicians have stated that Greece should remain in the euro is that they have to import their food. This would eliminate the majority of that problem. I strongly recommend Greeks look at this technology. It can also provide economic freedom from the EU.

The Way of the Future 

Posted Feb 5, 2016 by Martin Armstrong One of the more vital technological advancements has been developed. They can grow all the necessary food without farmland from inside a warehouse that is completely free from genetic tinkering or chemical whatever. This technology and has been doing a bang-up job around the world. It would probably not be a bad idea to set one up in a basement for the years ahead. This is the way of the future — fresh food coming from your basement.

So here we go. Expand your basement to the size of a few acres and grow wheat, rice and potatoes.


Some say say Martin Armstrong is an economist. He isn't one. He is a school drop-out who spent 11 years in jail. Anyway: How could any economist ignore economic principles?

Show me one farmer on earth who economically produces staple food without sunlight. There isn't one and there will never be one.
 
Just as a footnote, even unrefined crude oil is more expensive than grain by weight, and there will not be an economic replacement on a significant scale for open air agriculture powered by the sun to produce the food that humans need. Not ever.

Take for example his ideas on tariffs:

Why the Fed Cannot Reduce Rates to Offset Tariffs 

Mar 21, 2025 by Martin Armstrong

President Donald Trump is urging the Fed to cut interest rates to offset the inflation that will be caused by tariffs.

Yes you read this correctly. This is not what Trump said. Here Armstrong writes it again:

 Reducing interest rates will NOT offset inflation caused by tariffs ...

This is the hard proof that Armstrong is clueless about economic mechanisms in general. I bet that he does not even know how to work with equations. He just makes things up as he goes.

Fact: Inflation is not caused by tariffs. It's as simple as that. Armstrong fails to acknowledge:

• that USA consumer demand goes down when the price of a specific product increases.
• that USA consumers immediately begin searching for substitutes, or stop buying certain products, when the price increases.
• that foreign producers may absorb some or all of the tariff to maintain demand for their product.

 Here you can see the level of professionalism to expect from ANY of Martin Armstrong's publications.

Read more:

About Martin Armstrong’s Books

2015.75 ECM date was a big bummer for Armstrong

Martin Armstrong calling stock market to peak at 2015.75 was WRONG. In

Will the Dow Reach 30,000 by 2015? we read:

In other words, the real peak in equity is targeted to the next peak in the Economic Confidence Model 2015.75.

Armstrong calling bond market to peak at 2015.75 was WRONG. Let's see what he has to say in

Big Bang v REPO

Some would think that the forecast was wrong simply because the prices have not crashed. We have had the Bank of Japan saying they will buy government bonds on an unlimited basis. This is NOT a free market. It has “crashed” from the perspective of participation.

Wait a minute. Is he taking two guesses for the same date? That's cheating. And NEITHER predictions came true. Instead, with HINDSIGHT, he explained that bond markets crashed from the perspective of participation. Really?? Shouldn't your AI computer know about it, and predict that AHEAD of time instead of AFTER-the-fact?

Bond market participation?? That's why Armstrong called it as peak of Government Confidence, because NO ONE on Earth will measure that for him to be able to refute him, when he even does NOT define exactly what is government confidence.

Well, the best measurement IS the bond price.

Last time I checked, bonds did NOT crash. "Great" macro calls on his all important ECM date, when he himself nor his computer knows what will happen. What is the likelihood of him getting other things right, when the ECM calls are not right?

See also:

Major failed Predictions

The Mother of all Forecast Claims

In the following

Armstrong Interview Paris, France

Martin Armstrong makes the ultimate claim in the first sentence of the video:

Cela vous est-il arrivé de faire des prédictions qui sont avérées totalment fausses ?

Have you ever made predictions that are completely wrong?

No, not really, because it's, everything is connected.

He says he never fails. The Mother of all Forecast Claims!

More specifically, he claims that his predictions are accurate to the day. In:

The Real Implications of Forecasting Are More Profound Than you Think he writes:

COMMENT: Mr. Armstrong, I attended the Berlin Conference and I must say, you told us to expect a move between the Benchmarks in gold, and that the first quarter looked to be a countertrend move. You seem to be able to map out the direction of markets all the time. I am still working out the best way to read the arrays. But I have to ask. Why have you not been given the Noble Prize with such a long track record that is unbeatable?

REPLY: The fact that we can forecast any event to the day PROVES that markets are by no means RANDOM.

Computer never wrong

Furthermore, he claims that his computer is free of human bias and never wrong. In Opinion Infected by Bias. he writes:

The computer has never been wrong because it sees trends without interjecting some theory or bias which infects all opinion.

In The Time of Separation of the USA is Rapidly Approaching. he again writes:

Our computer has NEVER been wrong.

As any other charlatan and professional trickster, Martin Armstrong is an expert in fabricating deceptive material in support of his claims.

The details of how he does this are very important: His material is highly ambiguous. This means that for any of his fraudulent claims, there are multiple conflicting views in his smoke and mirrors machine. To get an idea, see:

Socrates Technical Analysis Prediction Magic 

He only needs to cherry-pick in hindsight the matching piece that support his agenda. I have seen him spend days looking for such pieces in the most obscure places just to prove his point. This web site exposes his methods in great detail. Do not expect this to be simple.

Compare his fraudulent projections with the facts:

Major failed Predictions 

Monthly Reversal Failures December 2018
Martin Armstrong Financial Advice: Do not buy the Low!
Socrates Long Term Past Performance Review
Weekly Superposition Event in the DOW October 2018
Quarterly Superposition Event in Gold 2015
The End of Bitcoin Currency, another failed forecast from Armstrong
Prediction of ECM model for 2015.75
ECM failure 2020
The Martin Armstrong Lie Detector
 

Claimed Successful Predictions He Never Made

For many of his predictions, the earliest going back decades, there is no evidence that he ever made them. Still his shills and cult members repeated them hundreds of times:

In Aladdin v Socrates he claims on Dec 20, 2022:

... when Socrates got the whole crash right. It picked the very day of the high in 2007 and they were calling it on the floor Armstrong’s Revenge.

At the time, Armstrong was imprisoned for fraud and wasn't making ANY public predictions. BTW his Socrates computer was not running at the time.

"Martin Armstrong the only one to forecast the Fall of the Berlin Wall"

"Martin Armstrong predicted the Top in the Nikkei to the Day"

 "Martin Armstrong predicted the March 2020 US Stock Market Low" 

Multiple of his shills claimed that he predicted the March 2020 low (which was a result of the Covid-19 pandemic). There is no evidence of such a prediction. it. In fact the opposite is true. For details, see: Martin Armstrong's 2020 ECM Turning Point

 
His claims are fraudulent misrepresentations of performance. Why?

Because Martin Armstrong sells his forecasts in the form of expensive reports, services and seminars.

That is why his business is a scam. Pure fraud.

"The Government wants the Computer Code for Forecasting" Conspiracy Theory

Martin Armstrong repeatedly claimed that the US Government was interested in the forecasting capability of his computer program and that it requested from him the source code of it.

He also claimed that the CIA requested from him he build a forecasting model for them.

He wrote that he declined in both cases, and that he spent 7 years in jail for contempt of court for his refusal.

Instead he claims that his computer model has self-awareness which allowed it to self-destruct when the hardware was physically moved by court order.

See:

Ukraine is a Disaster, Putin is the Moderate, & Truth is the Victim

Posted Jul 25, 2023 by Martin Armstrong
... I am the longest person ever held in civil contempt for refusing to turn over the source code to Socrates.

and:

Sorting the Nonsense & Prejudices from the Truth of Reality

Posted Mar 27, 2020 by Martin Armstrong
Money cannot buy everything in life. I turned down $500 million for Socrates where it would have just provided analysis for a single user. I rejected the request of the CIA to build a version for the US government. I offered to run any study they asked and was told they “had to own it.”

This is a ridiculous lie, a type of lie familiar to those dealing with charlatans. He might have gleaned it from other fabrications such as from the imaginary owner of his free energy scooter.

See:

Armstrong's Ignorance on Perpetual Motion Machine?

Later he changes his story and claims that the government locked him up to silence him. See:

 Martin Armstrong Book: The Plot to Seize Russia 

And because of that, they tried to silence me by imprisoning me on civil contempt for 7 years to prevent this story from being told.

He uses these fabricated stories for multiple purposes:

1. to distract from the real reason why the Government requested turnover of computer assets 
2. to conceal the fact that the court ordered him to turn over 15 million worth of assets stolen from investors
   
3. to distract from the fact that he most likely deleted files manually (files that the Government requested for different reasons), to conceal information about his crimes and about the stolen assets
   
4. to enhance his clients' perception of the capabilities of his computer (artificial intelligence, self-awareness)
5. to enhance his own status with heroism based on the false claim that he remained in prison for the sole reason that he refused to turn over his computer code to the court

Following are some links to documents with discussion of the topics above.

Deletion of Files

In ARMSTRONG v GUCCIONE we read:

A forensic computer expert testified that (1) one of the four returned computers had its hard drive removed, (2) on the morning before another computer was turned over to the receiver, more than 500 files had been erased from its hard drive, and (3) on the same day that a third computer was turned over, software was installed enabling the deletion of computer files and the computer’s internal clock was reset in an effort to mask the destruction of files.

In It’s just Time he writes:

I can confirm, that the system was laced with a virus. If it was ever removed from the office, it would know and self-destruct. That I believe took place for it appears the Government seized the computer, took if to a lab at the World Trade Center, ironically where it was destroyed in the attack. The Government seized the computer, but it self-destructed when moved.

The is consistent with a user installing a bulk erase software on a computer (as observed by the forensic expert) and executing it. There is nothing that indicates that a system was in place that could execute such a task when required, such as one that would detect a change of location. A forensic computer expert would have certainly detected such a system, including a virus (as Martin Armstrong claims) that could have executed it.

Even more so, if such delete action had been planned and built into the system, the discovery of 500 deleted files would have been prevented by removing / replacing the more than 500 file entries entirely. This is another proof that this story is a desperate excuse and smokescreen, after-the fact propaganda for the consumption of naive observers who know as little or less about computers as Armstrong himself.

Claims of superior Performance based on Computer-based Self-Awareness

Martin Armstrong likes to claim that his computer model has abilities exceeding contemporary AI (Artificial Intelligence), based on self-awareness, backed up by his claims that it erased the files under threat as described above.

In Self-Aware Artificial Intelligence he writes:

It achieved self-awareness. It immediately knew the government was trying to take it to its secret computer lab in WTC building 7 that mysterious collapsed even though nothing struck the building. They were angry when they realized it had self-destructed. It was aware of its surroundings and it took all but 7 seconds to self-destruct overwriting all code 7 times and shifting around so they could never un-erase and put him back together again. The Global Market Watch is running. It is being tested live and seems to have handled these turning points rather well. Reassembling something of this magnitude is truly an awesome project. It is time consuming to say the least. What is at stake is the creation of an artificial being that monitors the world around it. This is beyond creating a mere drone that people control from a distance. This is something that thinks on its own and tells you what it has explored.

In The Reversal System - Engineering Background you can discover how embarrassingly trivial the Socrates system really is. There is also evidence that he does not even know what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is.

See also:

Martin Armstrong and his Socrates: The Conspiracy of the Cartel
Disinformation

Fraudulent Blog Post Revisions

While Martin Armstrong's deliberate manipulation of past events has been documented here before, the following variant deserves the space for an individual article. He is increasingly using his Socrates private blog to evade scrutiny, and it was only a matter of time until someone discovered that he manipulates the history of his posts:

Martin Armstrong Discussion

I am so glad I happened on to this blog. I have been trying to figure out this guy’s ramblings for far too long. I got sucked in by the Forecaster movie - that’s a compelling story. I subscribed to his website and analyzed his posts (no easy feat) for the past year. I began to notice what appeared to be revisions in his historical posts to align with reality. I began to screen print his advice/predictions (no way to print otherwise) so I could compare. Yep - proved that. Have cancelled subscription.