12 The Solari Report / 2018 Annual Wrap Up / Part Two Investment banking suited me. I developed a reputation for taking on the transactions that others thought could not be done—typically, transactions that involved many different constituencies and financial flows. I liked sorting out highly complicated public-private financial flows. I liked working with people from scores of different industries, places, and worlds. I became a managing director and member of the board of directors in eight years—a record time. I could not imag- ine that I would ever have a career other than as an equity owner of Dillon Read. I did not love everything and everyone in the environment, but I loved my investment banking work. While at Dillon Read, I had my first run-in with fraudulent apartment deals and municipal housing bonds with credit dependent on mortgages insured by FHA/HUD on Wall Street, also described in my online book Dillon Read & Co., Inc. & the Aristocracy of Stock Profits. This may have had something to do with Nick Brady’s first comment to me when I informed him that I was going to be nominated as Assistant Secretary of Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner in 1989: “You can’t go to HUD—HUD is a sewer.” My then-husband was a successful securi- ties attorney who specialized in mortgage securities. As the housing bubble exploded through the 1980s, his business boomed. The banker who led the housing deals was recruited by John Birkelund and after leaving Dillon went to Rothschild, Inc., where John had worked before mov- ing to Dillon Read. I also had my first introduction to the concept of entrainment technology and subliminal program- ming. I overheard a discussion of this technology in 1984 in anticipation of its rollout on TV. This brief insight was frightening—and was the reason I gave up watching television that year. The Dillon Read partners sold the firm to Travelers Insurance in 1987, shortly after I became a partner. With Nick leaving to become Secretary of Treasury at the very end of the Reagan admin- istration, the handwriting was on the wall. With John Birkelund assuming control of the firm, I was no longer welcome at Dillon Read. It was not the only thing to come apart. Shortly after the firm was sold, my marriage ended in separation. I was divorced two years later. I had an offer from another firm to move when our non-compete contracts ended. I anticipated I could have more, as I had turned down inquiries from headhunters on the basis that I would honor my non-compete contract and my promise to Brady that I institutionalize my relationships and book of business before I left the firm. My other option was to go into the Bush administra- tion as several other partners were planning to do. There were several reasons why I wanted to work in the federal government. I had become convinced after eleven years on Wall Street—with exposure to many different parts of the econ- omy and financial markets—that the U.S. economy was engineered through Washington, by monetary policy engineered by the Federal Reserve and fiscal policy engineered by Congress and the Executive branch. To understand how the money in one neighborhood in West Philadelphia worked—let alone figure out how to get it to work well—I needed to understand federal financ- es. Another reason was that I was confident that entering government service would ensure that the business I had built would stay at Dillon Read. Keeping this promise to Brady and the firm was very important to me. My loyalty was not reciprocated. I went to work at HUD despite the fact that Nick Brady, now Secretary of the Treasury in President George H.W. Bush’s administration, blackballed me with the Bush transition team. I now believe that Brady did so for reasons relating to my parents’ deaths, although it took me many years to come to that conclusion. It was not the first time that