I almost wept with joy when I clicked this link: the site of convicted fraudster and inventor of the “Pi Cycle Economic Confidence Model“, Martin Armstrong, who continues his economic forecasting, financial and geopolitical analysis from within the walls of Fort Dix, New Jersey.
He’s been producing a series of beautiful handmade essays — typed, illustrated, pasted, photocopied and released on the ‘net — at an astonishing rate since April ‘09:
An unfairly flattering rendering of Goldman
boss, Lloyd Blankfein, from Armstrong’s July 10
essay on G.S.: “The Real Deep Capture” (pdf).
Dominic Frisby, one of Britain’s leading voiceover artists, writes in Moneyweek.com (15 Apr ‘09):
Martin Armstrong’s story reads like a thriller. He was a globe-trotting and extremely contrarian investment manager, who in the late 1990s was accused of misappropriating Japanese investors of some $700 million in some kind of Ponzi scheme.
It appears that, like Nick Leeson, the money was lost on bad bets in the currency markets and losses were being concealed, though Armstrong said he did not authorise the trades. Nevertheless, he was indicted in 1999 and ordered by Judge Richard Owen to turn over gold bars and antiquities, which he is said to have bought with his firm’s money, as well as computers and documents.
Armstrong delivered four of the five computers sought, eight of the 11 requested boxes of documents and gold coins worth $1.1 million. The receiver said assets worth about $15 million were missing; Armstrong insisted that was all he had. Judge Owen – revisiting the order every 18 months – held him on contempt of court for some seven years, some kind of record for time in prison without trial. Nevertheless, Owen repeatedly held that Mr. Armstrong was motivated by greed and was awaiting his release from jail to retrieve the $15 million that the government said was missing.
Mr. Armstrong’s years in jail for civil contempt match the sentence of six-and-a-half to eight years that he would have received if he had been convicted of all 24 criminal counts of securities fraud, commodities fraud and wire fraud. But in late 2006, after appeal, Judge Owen was removed from the case. In 2007, after a period in solitary, Armstrong faced trial, pleaded guilty and is now serving a prison sentence for a further five years.
Other links:
- Armstrong used to chair the ‘Princeton Economics International’ an “independent research organization“– who have a blogspot website.
- 2007 Moneyweek article “The Strange Case of the Jailed Market Genius”.
- Fans of history will enjoy Armstrong’s Sept 20 essay, “The Collapse of the Rule of Law – A Prelude to Disaster” (pdf).
- “The Business Cycle and the Future“, 1999, by Armstrong.
- Armstrong used to chair the ‘Princeton Economics International’ an “independent research organization“– who have a blogspot website.
- 2007 Moneyweek article “The Strange Case of the Jailed Market Genius”.
- Fans of history will enjoy Armstrong’s Sept 20 essay, “The Collapse of the Rule of Law – A Prelude to Disaster” (pdf).
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