The Forecaster DVD is now available on Amazon in English. Use the link above for purchase.
(Review of the Film available in LA Weekly)
The story of espionage and duplicity that financial adviser Martin Armstrong relates in Marcus Vetter’s documentary The Forecaster is as serpentine and fascinating as a John le Carré novel. Its narrative thread convincingly weaves multiple financial collapses, the ouster of Boris Yeltsin and the rise of the Putin oligarchy around Armstrong’s life’s work — a mathematical model that predicts market peaks and collapses and, allegedly, the wars that accompany both.
Martin’s Economic Confidence Model tracks 26 market panics over 224 years, applies some arithmetic and extrudes a market cycle based on pi. Apparently! His published work from the 1980s to the present is uncanny in its accurate predictions of the market crash of 1987, the Soviet collapse, the first Gulf War and the housing collapse of 2007.
Director Vetter’s film, which includes Armstrong’s preposterous 11-year incarceration on contempt charges for refusing to turn over his source code, includes a lot of Ken Burns–style pans across scary-looking graphs of money apocalypses past and future, as well as interviews with Armstrong’s many supporters, all set to a pensive soundtrack of ominous tones.