97 The Real Game of Missing Money · Financial Sense Interview: “America’s Black Budget and the Manipulation of Markets” · “On the Solari Investment Model” In these writings, I describe the economics involved in government housing, welfare, prison, and municipal programs in the early 1990s. Federal spending seemed intentionally designed to ensure that there could be no flexibility between categories. We were spending $55,000 a year for a woman and 1.8 children to live in a place and in a manner such that they would and indeed could never become taxpayers and get off the dole. We were spending $150- 250,000 to build public housing while HUD foreclosed homes that could be bought and fixed up for $50,000 and were available a block away. We were pay- ing large corporations $35-150 dollars an hour to do things that people who lived in those neighbourhoods could be trained to do. The implications were enormous: theoretically, at least, there was the opportunity, using more accurate place based information, to place public finances on a sounder footing in which the taxpayers’ investment returns were positive. Therein lay a problem however, because there was no political constituency for place-based financial statements. Return on invest- ment to special interests was not compatible with a positive return on investment to taxpayers. There were two kinds of special interests. The first were technically legal. The second were illegal. The second was growing. My refusal to follow illegal orders and success at cleaning up Iran Contra fraud ultimately led to my leaving the Administration in 1990. I was told the day after I left that the preparation of place-based financial accounting and statements had been terminated. Catherine Austin Fitts, “The Myth of the Rule of Law” In late 1995, The Hamilton Securities Group began work on Community Wiz- ard, a software tool designed to facilitate community Internet access to all public data and some private data on local resource use, including federal tax, expen- ditures and credit data. The initial response to the tool from Congress, HUD and our technology networks was astonishing. People were ecstatic to realize that they did not have to continue to live and work in the dark financially. It was a relatively easy thing for new software tools to help people learn about the flow of money and resources in their community. Additional software tool development also resulted in numerous tools to analyze subsidized housing in a place-based context, including detailed pricing tools that combined significant databases on government rules and regulations with all of our pricing data from the various loan sales, with databases about mortgage, municipal and stock market financing of homebuilding and home ownership. Such tools would allow people to take a positive and proactive role in insuring that government resources were well used. Such tools would allow investors to improve the performance of local investments. Catherine Austin Fitts, Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. & the Aristocracy of Stock Profits Luis Mendez, one of my partners at Dillon Read, visited me in Washington in 1996. [I] explained to him that there was currently no mechanism to optimize government investment and operations within a place. There was no political