“The Forecaster is as serpentine and fascinating as a John le Carré novel...“ LA Weekly  

In September Rialto Channel is working with NZ Listener magazine to present their weekly Thursday night documentaries, which this month have been titled ‘'Big Brother”. The season could not kick off more perfectly then than with tonight’s documentary, THE FORECASTER, an astonishing piece of filmmaking about a very wronged man (or was he?).

“The Forecaster is as serpentine and fascinating as a John le Carré novel...“ LA Weekly  

In September Rialto Channel is working with the NZ Listener to present their weekly Thursday night documentaries, which this month have been titled ‘'Big Brother”. The season could not kick off more perfectly then than with tonight’s documentary, THE FORECASTER, an astonishing piece of filmmaking about a very wronged man (or was he?).

THE FORECASTER is a feature documentary about Marty Armstrong, a financial mastermind who used the number pi in the nineties to predict economic turning points with incredible precision. Lauded and applauded for his work, he was named economist of the decade in the nineties, but the Japanese just called him Mr. YEN. To say the man was influential would be an understatement, and it’s clear that not only his fans were hanging on every word.

The FBI stormed his offices in 1999, forcing him to hand over his secret model or else – and he naturally was reluctant to comply. He was then arrested and accused of masterminding a Ponzi scheme, which to this day he still vehemently denies. Just a few days later he was incarcerated for seven years for contempt of court without a trial, and the extraordinary tale really begins. For not handing over his amazingly accurate forecasting system called the Economic Confidence Mode to the CIA and Wall Street he was jailed for nearly a decade, and in torture type conditions at that. The story is almost unbelievable in the lengths that the US government and Wall Street would go to try to get this code, and what unravels is an espionage-type tale of finance, economics, money and the markets.  

Armstrong has now been released from prison and agreed to be the focal point of the movie - a piece on the Financial Crisis the US is currently facing – the Sovereign Debt Crisis. As good as blacklisted in its country of origin, it is a doomsayer like none other. Martin Armstrong's next date for a major market crisis, according to his models (which were designed and predicted this date in the 1980s), is on October 1st of this year. How scared should we be?

A New York Times reviewer has gone on record as saying that THE FORECASTER has the “distinct hermetic feel of a documentary that employs an echo chamber of people too close to the material,” but I found it fascinating nonetheless. Is he a mastermind or a criminal? I’m not qualified to even hazard a guess, but by god it makes for a great tale.

If you are into the markets and a follower of government and financial elite corruption, this film makes for a great watch, and you can read more in this week’s New Zealand Listener to boot.