A controversial ‘superforecaster’ has predicted that World War III is about to begin, while will lead to the collapse of the US by 2032.
Martin Armstrong has made the stark claims using AI-powered computer named ‘Socrates’ that he programed to monitors the world news feeds and looks for fundamental news events that correlate behind the global trends.
Armstrong, who used Socrates to predict Japan’s 1989 real estate crash and Russia’s 1998 financial crisis, now believes the current conflict in Ukraine will cascade into a wider international conflict, based on the latest data analysis.
‘I think it’s the only real artificial intelligence system in the world,’ the infamous, self-taught economic modeler told DailyMail.com.
Armstrong created the AI program out of a desire to write software that could automate hedge fund trading back in the 1970s and ’80s.
In time, however, he began to realize that his code could also anticipate global conflicts.
‘People always know’ when war is about to erupt, as he describes the data ‘tea leaves’ Socrates digitally sifts through,’ said Armstrong said, ‘then there will be no stoppiAnd thus, there’re always telltale movements of capital before a conflict begins or expands, as the war in Ukraine might.
‘People always know’ when war is about to erupt, as he describes the data ‘tea leaves’ Socrates digitally sifts through,’ Armstrong said, ‘then there will be no stopping war World War III.
Armstrong correctly predicted the collapse of Russia (Martin Armstrong)
‘And thus, there’re always telltale movements of capital before a conflict begins or expands, as the war in Ukraine might.
He continued to explain that in June 1998, the ‘computer projected that Russia was going to collapse. That turned into a long-term capital management crisis.
‘It’s all about the capital flows.’
This summer, Armstrong saw troubling corroboration outside of his Socrates financial model, when Russia’s ally North Korea pledged their own troops to Ukraine’s Donetsk region, ostensibly to assist Russia in reconstruction efforts for a sum of $115 million per year.
‘This opens the door for the West to send troops to Ukraine under the same premise,’ Armstrong wrote in June. ‘All the chess pieces are aligned and ready.’
But Socrates’ inventor wasn’t always so focused on war.
Born in New Jersey, Armstrong was encouraged by his lawyer father to get involved with computers in the 1960s — a hobby that fueled his fascination with markets amid the Crash of 1966.
He became particularly obsessed with the cycles of booms and busts, noticing that the same kinds of oscillations recurred across different markets.
So, Armstrong built a global model in the mid-1970s and began publishing results in 1972, calling his simulation the ‘Economic Confidence Model.’
As he told The New Yorker in 2009, he found that the business cycle comes full circle every 8.6 years.
‘In the 80s, I was in Geneva, when we were all dealing with the OPEC money. I saw Japan starting to rise, and capital began to flow to Asia,’ as he told DailyMail.com.
Crowds mob banks as the Russian economy collapses in 1998 (AFP)
Martin Armstrong saw considerable success predicting markets
‘Observing these capital flows, I wrote a program to track and predict where capital would move next,’ he continued.
This work set the stage for some of Armstrong’s most shockingly accurate predictions and the unwanted attention and trouble they brought.
‘In the ’80s, one of the top banks in Lebanon asked me to build a model,’ he recalled.
‘I called them and said that I thought something was wrong with the data. I said, ‘The computer is saying your country is going to fall apart in eight days.”
‘And my client at the bank said to me, ‘Well what currency does it recommend,’ and I replied, ‘Swiss francs.”
‘Eight days later,’ as Armstrong remembers it, ‘the Civil War began.’
In the ’80s and ’90s, Armstrong briefed US Congress on the world economy, visited Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain — and he said the CIA sought his expertise in the wake of the Russia’s 1998 financial collapse.
‘Today, the computer just pulls down reports from around the world, and writes over 1000 forecasting reports every day,’ he told DailyMail.com.
But, Armstrong is a controversial figure: after building his reputation in the ’80s and ’90s, he spent 11 years in jail for cheating investors out of $700 million in 1999 in what was described as a ‘three billion dollar Ponzi scheme.’
Armstrong’s system predicted the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon
As the New York Times noted of his curious trial, Armstrong spent seven years in jail from 2000 to 2007 for civil contempt before even facing a jury or being sentences.
‘Mr. Armstrong’s years in jail will soon exceed the sentence of 6.5 to 8 years that he would have received if he had been convicted of all 24 criminal counts of securities fraud, commodities fraud and wire fraud,’ they noted.
‘The case sends a very bad signal,’ as Armstrong’s one-time criminal defense attorney Bernard V. Kleinman put it.
In 2014, a documentary ‘The Forecaster’ chronicled Armstrong’s life — although it was derided by critics for being ‘one-sided’ in the forecaster’s defense.
Armstrong compares his pivot into ‘superforecaster’ major geopolitical events to the kind of accidental breakthroughs scientists have made in the lab.
‘It’s kind of like when they discovered penicillin by mistake,’ he told DailyMail.com.
‘This is the same thing. I didn’t start to create some sort of program that would predict wars. It just happened.’
Armstrong said that in 2011 the ‘war cycle’ was when things had began to turn up, which is why he now believes that Ukraine is where World War III will start, as its earliest hostilities match that timeline.
In 2014, a documentary ‘The Forecaster’ chronicled Armstrong’s life
‘There have been so many wars fought over Crimea,’ he added, ‘more than practically any other area.’
‘Unfortunately, we have a bunch of neocons, what we call they’re in the United States. They’re controlling NATO. Every country has them. Russia has them. China has them. They just want war all the time.’
Armstrong said he believes that things will ‘heat up’ in Ukraine in 2025, and ‘the end of it is probably 2027.’
‘These people just want perpetual war,’ He opined.
Armstrong said that he believes Donald Trump is an anti-war candidate, and that he has spoken to Robert F Kennedy Jr on the phone and that he too is anti-war.
‘He knows that his uncle and father were taken out because of that,’ according to Armstrong, ‘and so I think what’s going on is that they’re very afraid that if Trump wins, it would shut down all the funding for Ukraine.’
A Russian Iskander-K missile launched during a military exercise at a training ground at the Luzhsky Range, near St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2017
Armstrong also believes that the current government system will collapse in 2032 — based not on the 8.6 year cycle of boom and bust, but on a larger cycle.
‘Now with 2032, what the computer’s been projecting is that roughly every 300 years, we go through cycles where governments change forms,’ he explained.
‘It doesn’t matter what form of government we choose; there’s always corruption, and they basically die from economic suicide. The last time this happened, it was with monarchies. The United States had a revolution against the monarchy, and then you saw it spread to France like contagion.’
‘2032 will be the end of the Republic,’ he predicted.
Armstrong said that he hopes governments will move closer to a ‘direct democracy’ where policy is set by polling the public on their opinions.
He voiced the opinion that the so-called current ‘Great Reset’ driven by the World Economic Forum and its chairman Klaus Schwab is doomed to fail
The ‘Great Reset,’ he said, is ‘definitely related’ to not only the outbreak of international war, but also to modern day political polarization.
‘Abraham Lincoln said that a country divided cannot stand, and here in the United States, it is extremely polarized,’ Armstrong stated.
‘Just look at the Democratic Convention. I mean, they threw out Trump’s name 289 times. It was more of a hate fest. It’s not like ‘Vote for me. I’m going to do this. I’ll run this better.’ It’s ‘Vote for me because he’s evil.”
