Fascinating article about economics, time cycles, and getting rich off them

Long and fascinating article about Martin Armstrong, a controversial investor and his theories of time cycles. He seems to have cracked a profound secret, revolving around the numbers "8.6." and "pi." Or has he? An exerpt:

..One day, in a newspaper, he came across a list of financial panics that occurred between 1683 and 1907. On a lark, he divided the span (two hundred and twenty-four years) by the number of panics (twenty-six) and found that, on average, there had been a panic every 8.6 years. As he read more, he began to suspect that 8.6 was a highly significant number. He discerned a recurrence of major turning points in the economy and in world affairs that followed a distinct and unwavering 8.6-year rhythm. Six cycles of 8.6 years added up to a long-wave cycle of 51.6 years, which separated such phenomena as Black Friday and the commodity panic of 1920, and the Second and Third Punic Wars...

...He opened a forecasting firm called Princeton Economics International, based in Princeton, New Jersey. His model singled out, in advance, the day of the October, 1987 crash. “Never did I expect this to work on such a precise time level,” he wrote later, in an essay called “Understanding the Real Economy.” “It made no sense. I personally assumed it was just a fluke. This took place on the minor half-way point up the first leg of the 8.6-year cycle, at 2.15 years.” Afterward, he was messing around with numbers and realized that 8.6 years was exactly three thousand one hundred and forty-one days: 3,141, the number pi times a thousand. The cycle mystery had deepened. If pi was essential to the physical world, perhaps it somehow governed the markets, or the fluctuations in human behavior and mood that manifested themselves in the markets. It was, after all, the magic number associated with the swing of a pendulum, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the Great Pyramid at Giza. Why not the vast monuments of data known as the financial markets? “Suddenly I saw it in my mind’s eye,” he wrote. “There was a Geometry of Time itself.”

Armstrong didn’t tell anyone about pi. He kept it a secret for twelve years, and he continued to sell his services as a consultant at up to ten thousand dollars an hour...

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[edit on 10/10/09 by silent thunder]

thanks for the heads up.

this mans work reminds me of 'The Fourth Turning'
** courtesy of bingsearch: [ "book, the fourth turning" ]

-The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy -- Thom Hartmann's ...
... years ago, in a book about how every four generations (roughly 80 years) history repeats itself, the authors had the prescience to write: "The next Fourth Turning ...



The Fourth Turning is published by Broadway Books, NY
and is availible where books are sold.
Popular links
About the Book Discussions Excerpts from the Book Generations & Archetypes The AuthorsGo to the pageCheck out the web site for Strauss and Howe's latest book, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.

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The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe
More on this page
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans have become a changed people. We yearn for ''normalcy,'' but what will that new normal be? Click here for a commentary by Strauss and Howe.

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TLifecourse Associates: The Fourth Turning (Book)
About this Publication. Looking back to the dawn of the modern world, The Fourth Turning reveals a distinct pattern in human history, cycles lasting about the length of a long life. Each cycle is composed of four 'turnings' and each turning lasts the span of a generation, about 20 years.

There are four kinds of turnings (High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crises) and they always occur in the same order....


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which also dovetails with eastern thought....i.e. Kali Yuga, and man's entry into the 'Dwapara Yuga' the electrical/atomic/etheral Age