reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
I recount a meeting I had with a board at Safeguard Scientifics, where a firm co-located with them had a board member present. I demonstrated what was possible if we reengineered the government money, arguing there was enormous opportunity to build vast financial equity gains and capital gains, and that pension funds could profit by reengineering how the federal budget worked to create a more productive economy. The president of the largest pension fund in the country attended and told me, “you don’t understand.” He explained that this is what they had tried to do when he was younger, working with a group of activists, and they were able to stop them. I naively said, “you didn’t have the Internet. You couldn’t get the learning speeds up locally high enough to jump the curve.” He froze, looked at me, and said, “you don’t understand. It’s too late.” I asked, “what do you mean it’s too late?” He replied, “it’s too late. They’ve given up on the country and they’re gonna move all the money out of the country starting in the fall.”
He said, “you’ve got to get to Nick Brady.” Brady had been the chairman of the firm I was a partner at on Wall Street and later became secretary of the treasury in the first Bush administration, known as a leader in how the financial system runs. So the instruction was to get to Nick Brady. I thought the message meant we had been directed to reallocate equity in the pension funds to emerging market investments, which made sense because growth rates in Asia and emerging markets exceeded those in mature economies. But then, at the outset, he mentioned “they’re moving all the money out starting the fall.” That fall marked the beginning of fiscal 1998, when enormous amounts of money began disappearing from my old agencies, HUD and the Department of Defense.
What I later came to believe, and we have a website dedicated to presenting documents and analysis on this, is missingmoney.salaire.com. I realized that what he was referring to was a financial coup—an attempt to end the system where bankers controlled monetary policy while the people’s representatives controlled fiscal policy, and instead move to a process in which bankers controlled both. Rather than pursuing new legislation, they would leverage debt, issue vast debt, and siphon money out the back door, effectively conducting a financial coup d’etat, which is what I think has happened.