High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Martin Armstrong (born November 1, 1949 in New Jersey) is the son of a lawyer and Lt. Col under General Patton in World War II. His full biography is on line. 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 the gold business that he had begun while in high school to earn money for a family trip to Europe in the summer of 1964. 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 U.S. coinage in 1965 and by 1968 gold began trading in bullion form in London. The gold standard collapsed entirely in the summer of 1971 when President Nixon closed the gold window. In 1975 it became legal in America, for the first time since 1933, to trade gold in bullion form. Armstrong began exploring financial panics after witnessing the Crash of 1966. He went on to develop timing models such as the "Economic Confidence Model" that have been the subject of many press articles Armstrong`s discovery of this cycle was called The Secret Cycle by the New Yorker Magazine.. This model had stunning accuracy: it 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).