192 The Solari Report / 2018 Annual Wrap Up / Part Two watched The Wave Genome, Ulrike’s second episode for the Future Science Series—if you have not watched it, you must see it! Alastair Thompson, publisher of Scoop Media who is now working in Europe, joined me in Chartres and off we went to Normandy and Brittany, including a day at Mont-Saint-Michel during the celebration of the Assumption of Mary in August. Then I headed to southern France to join Vanessa Biard—entrepreneur, journalist, and political commentator. In the process, we visited the Salvador Dali museum in Figueres and the Cathar castles, road tripping from Perpignan to Toulouse. I then headed back to the Netherlands for more time in Stavoren, working with Robert Dupper. Returning to Hickory Valley in early September, I headed by car to North Carolina, where I joined Dr. Skidmore and his wife Kate for a wonderful dinner with Greg and Betty Hunter. The Skidmores and I then headed to the Biltmore in Asheville for a wonderful lunch with subscribers who had traveled from around the region. Some time in Hickory Valley gave me the opportunity to begin our 3rd Quarter 2018 Wrap Up: Megacities and the Growth of Global Real Estate Companies. I had wanted to invest research time in this topic for several years, and writing in the 2nd Quarter about growth in Asia made me realize that now was the time. Special thanks to Jason Worth for his excellent work on real estate com- pany stocks in the Megacities Wrap Up as well as on space stocks in the earlier 1st Quarter 2018 Wrap Up. I next headed back to the Netherlands to attend a workshop on the Book of Enoch taught by Ulrike—and to spend time with Jeroen van Straaten and on their plans for Breakthrough Ener- gy and Secret Space Program conferences. Stay tuned for exciting developments in Spring 2020. Then I headed to Switzerland to spend some time with Thomas Meyer and his family before returning to the United States. Thomas launched his first salon in Basel for subscribers of his magazines Der Europäer and The Present Age—it was a remarkable event. Life is what happens when you were making other plans. I had not planned for the U.S. federal government to take itself and the majority of the U.S. securities market dark during 2018—but it did so when it adopted FASAB 56 in October. No one noticed, because coverage of the brutal assassination of a Washington Post reporter and the teenage sex stories of a Supreme Court Justice nominee was filling up digital screens and airways. In the meantime, the missing money story was experiencing an unprecedented level of “modified limited hangouts” and disinformation. I decided to change the topic of the 2018 Annual Wrap Up to The Real Game of Missing Money. I set to work with attorney Carolyn Betts to write Caveat Emptor: Why Investors Need to Do Due Diligence on U.S. Treasury and Related Securities and to assemble the comprehensive document before you. This significantly increased the Solari Team’s workload and extended the publication deadline. That said, I believe it is essential that this material—and particularly the facts that citi- zens, pension fund beneficiaries and trustees, and investors need to assess their political and credit risk issues—be organized and published in hard copy. Throughout the year, I had the help and support of numerous critical allies. These included the Saker, who joins me for quarterly Solari Reports on The Emerging Multipolar World, and Rambus,