95 The Real Game of Missing Money everybody scared to death, and that’s why all these horrible things in the financial system are happening. And the reality is you can’t solve that problem by more complex financial engineering.” And the person looked at me and said, “I know, but that’s too depressing to deal with. I just want to do something positive.” Jon: Wow! Wow! Catherine: I heard that again and again—I went through the same thing—several conversations on county banks, which ultimately I’ll do a Solari Report or write an arti- cle about. It was at the next salon that we had the county bank argument, and I said to somebody, “You know, all you’re going to do is make fascism easier to implement.” And they said, “Well, I just want to do something positive. I don’t want to get into the dangerous people who have the”—you know. And I thought, “Oh, this is really scary, because we’re trying to solve a political problem with a financial solution. You can’t solve a political problem with a financial solution.” And all you can do is make life more complicated for the honest people and just load more up on the—I mean, it’s amazing the honest people are getting anything done at all. It’s quite remarkable what they’re able to accomplish without support and at great risk. So there’s an upside-down thinking, and as I was striving to see when I was thinking about this. I have this little matrix of who and what and global and local. It’s your rows are local and global, and then your columns are who and what. And so everybody keeps talking about what—you know, so what things—so banking or community currencies as opposed to, “Well, who’s really doing this, and how do we change that?” My theory is you can have the stupidest financial system in the world, and if you have really people of great character and intelligence and ability leading it, they’ll get it to work. It’s not ide- al, but they’ll get it to work. And if you put criminals on top of the most eloquently and beautifully designed financial system, you’re going to get slaughtered. So you can’t solve this with financial engineering, because that ain’t the problem. The problem we have is who’s running it and how they’re running it, and the reality is we don’t even know why they’re behaving the way they’re behaving. We can guess, but we don’t really know. So it’s very hard. This is like your doctor deciding to operate and do surgery on you when he really doesn’t know what’s wrong. It’s like, “Well, you know, I don’t really know why you’re sick, but I’m going to cut off your arm because I want to do something positive.” It doesn’t make any sense. Jon: No. Catherine Austin Fitts and Jon Rappoport, “The Power of It,” The Solari Report The more we can understand about who is really running things and what their goals and con- cerns are, the more we can determine the pathways to building new, more positive alignments. Performance The remarkable and miraculous secret is that if our governmental resources were invested to opti- mize return on investment, the wealth creation possibilities would be exponential. Investment of