Martin Armstrong: "Interest rates rise will not be slow" - Video

In this excerpt of our 1-hour interview with Martin Armstrong, Gonçalo Moreira asks the famous analyst if he agrees that, as many people think, interest rates rise will be slow. His answer is straight-forward: "No, nothing ever works that way."

"We did a major study of Rome, because I wanted to answer that question: "How did Rome fall?" [...] It collapsed in just eight years! It goes from Silver coins to bronze, that's it, gone! When change comes it comes very rapidly," explains Armstrong.

"We have as a society, collectively, a herd mentality," says the developer of the Economic Confidence Model. He uses the metaphore of a herd of zebras running because only one zebra saw a lion and says the markets function the same way.

Armstrong takes the example of the 87 crash. A commission investigated why Black Monday happened and started to ask questions to everyone: "Why did you sell?". "It was the lack of information, not because of news," he analyzes.
Fund managers saw the Dow down 500 points, brokers could not explain why, nobody knew.
"From a fund manager's perspective, you do not know now if it's going to go down 500 points tomorrow. So to be conservative, what do you do? You sell and get out! Because I don't know what's going on!"
Going back to Gonçalo's question, he explains: "If interest rates are going up, the Fed, a quarter point, etc. You have experience so you can hold, you can make a judgment call. No news? You just get out." All these individual decisions will be added one to the other, as in the case of the herd of zebras.

He then concludes: "When interest rise happens, it will happen very rapidly. The public is not as stupid as the press and the government think."

Watch our full 1-hour interview with Martin Armstrong.