There are two interesting issues surrounding Mr. Armstrong.

1) That he was held in jail without being charged or convicted of a crime for seven years by a judge for being in "contempt of court"
2) His claim (to date unverifiable) that he has perfected or at least vastly improved on Kondratieff Wave analysis via computer modeling.

The first issue is simple judicial tyranny. It should bother any US citizen that someone can be held in jail for seven years without being charged, tried, or convicted of a crime. However, I am most interested in Armstrong's claim to have perfected Kondratieff Wave analysis.  

I would note that Armstrong is far from the first to promote the use of very long term cyclical modeling of the economy. Modeling of this type can be traced back to Nikolai Kondratieff who identified four stages of cyclic behavior and identified the as spring, summer, autumn and winter. Kondratieff calculated that a complete cycle or wave lasted for approximately 53 years. He published his theory in 1925 in his book "The Major Economic Cycles". Kondratieff overlaid his wave on world history and projected it forward.



Kondratieff also noted that those same 53 year economic cycles could be relied upon to mark major world conflicts. Below is the 53 year war cycle that was derived from his work and nestled within that a 17.7 year war cycle.






The best discussion of Kondratieff Wave analysis that I have come across was published by Grant Williams in his superb article The Consequences of the Economic Peace
(Note clicking the link will prompt you to sign up for the newsletter this can just be closed to proceed to the article)

So what happened to Mr. Kondratiev? He was accused by the soviets of being a member of a "Peasants Labour Party". Convicted as a "kulak-professor" and sentenced to 8 years in prison. In September 1938 during Stalin's Great Purge, he was subjected to a second trial, condemned to ten years without the right to correspond with the outside world and executed by firing squad on the same day the sentence was issued.