Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave. O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? ...

Troublesome stuff. IMO.

Copied this from Wikipedia: Martin Armstrong (born November 1, 1949 in New Jersey the son of a lawyer and Lt. Col under General Patton in World War II. His full biography is on line.[1] In short, Martin was encouraged by his father to get involved in computers during the mid-1960s. He completed engineering both in hardware and software but he returned to gold business that he had first began working while in High School to earn money for a family trip to Europe in 1964 for the summer. He continued to work on weekends through high school finding the real world exciting, for this was the beginning of the collapse of the gold standard. Silver was removed from the coinage in 1965 and by 1968 gold began trading in bullion form in London. The gold standard collapsed entirely in the summer of 1971 and gold became legal to trade in America in 1975 in bullion form. Armstrong began exploring financial panics after witnessing the Crash of 1966. He went on to develop timing models that have been the subject of many press articles - the Economic Confidence Model.[2] Armstrong's discovery of this cycle was called The Secret Cycle by the New Yorker Magazine.[3] and this model had stunning accuracy and had pinpointed changes in the economy right to the day. In Time Magazine, Justin Fox wrote that Armstrong's model "made several eerily on-the-mark calls using a formula based on the mathematical constant pi." (Pg 30; Nov. 30, 2009).

Princeton Economics International, Ltd. established offices in Paris, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Sydney, Australia employing about 240 people around the world. In 1983, the Wall Street Journal cited him as the highest paid advisor. He became one of the top currency analysts and his work was requested by the Presidential Task Force (Brady Commission) investigating the 1987 Crash. The firm rose to be perhaps the largest multinational corporate advisor in the world and by the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, Armstrong was invited by China and he flew to Beijing to advise the Central Bank.

After discovering that staff at Republic National Bank were illegally trading in the company accounts, Armstrong through counsel threatened to file suit if the funds were not returned within one week. Instead, Republic went to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and alleged that Armstrong had conspired with their own staff to hide trading losses from his clients in Japan. The allegation of a $1 billion fraud caused the government to rush in and admit in open court that they had filed charges solely based upon what Republic told them and had not bothered to contact any alleged clients in Japan. They admitted that Armstrong was not in default of any obligation to Japanese investors. When it became clear that the accounts were simply unsecured borrowings of Japanese yen, mostly at fixed rates of interest, and outright purchases of Japanese portfolios from public corportions and were NOT solicitations for managed accounts. Armstrong was thrown in contempt of court for an allegedly missing $1.3 million out of $3 billion. When friends offered to put the entire sum of money up for bail, the court denied bail at any price at the direction of a receiver, Alan Cohen of Goldman Sachs and Tancred Schiavoni of O'Melveny & Myers. They kept Armstrong in prison for more than seven years denying him a trial, a right to a lawyer and freezing all funds. They claimed the contempt was "civil," not criminal and thus there were no rights normally afforded criminal defendants.

Ultimately, Republic National Bank pled guilty and all its directors received absolute immunity provided they return $606 million. Despite the fact that the deal was that all alleged victims be made whole, Cohen and Schiavoni refused to allow Armstrong to be released and he was held for another 5 years in prison on contempt of court. Armstrong was only released after the Supreme Court ordered the government to respond to a petition, which replied that the contempt had been vacated. Armstrong was held in contempt of court for nearly 7.5 years. The government agreed to drop all the charges except for a conspiracy count, telling Armstrong that if he pled, he could argue for time served. When he took the deal, the government then argued that the court had no power to provide such a credit and refused to release him once again. Armstrong is still on appeal in Washington, DC and the case will no doubt go to the Supreme Court. After spending more than 7 years in prison on contempt of court, Judge Keenan ruled Armstrong owed no restitution whatsoever.