41 The Real Game of Missing Money The end result was that Hamilton finished the process of tax compliance in 2010. Hamilton’s total tax liabilities were $0, but our accounting, CPA, and legal bills to file our federal, state, and local tax returns were approximately $150,000. Complexity is expensive—purposefully so. In January 2006, the Bush administration had two more years to run. I was doing more and more Internet and radio shows to explain what was happening in America—with regular attention to the missing money and its relationship to mortgage fraud and the black budget. One of the things I encouraged people to do was to bank local, an effort I had started in 2004 with a campaign called, “Where would Jesus bank?” One of my slogans at the time was, “Who’s your banker, who’s your farm- er, where’s your money?” I hoped that it would focus my audience on the importance of financing reliable farmers and bankers and decentralizing the sources of their food and financial transactions. I also made several unsuccessful attempts at creating tools to help Americans map out their local financial ecosystems. However, the online hacking problems were significant. Moreover, the resistance to developing local financial literacy was surprisingly strong in our audience. Between 2004–2006, I took what was left of Hamilton’s legacy software and databases after I got them back from court control (the most valuable pieces were mysteriously missing) to a number of institutions in the hopes that they would make them public. No one wanted to touch them—too dangerous. In April, 2006, I published Dillon Read & Co. Inc. & the Aristocracy of Stock Profits. I wrote it for sev- eral reasons. First, it had become clear to me by 2005 that much of the financial fraud and corruption was being engineered through the Federal Reserve and the federal government—but most Americans did not understand the economic model. I felt that it could help to provide a case study that showed how government funding was being used to promote expensive and unproductive public-private part- nerships that generated big profits on Wall Street and kickbacks in the form of campaign contribu- tions. Second, I had come to believe my promotion of small business in low-income communities had created a competition with the investors benefiting from private prisons and gentrification, and again, I wanted to explain the model. Finally, I needed to help people understand why I had been targeted. The whole, long noisy affair had left a question mark in the marketplace: Why was it so important to make an example out of Catherine Austin Fitts and Hamilton Securities? To understand what had happened, you needed to understand the financial coup d’état underway. The response to the book was quite gratifying. However, every time I tried to publish it in hard copy, the headwinds would begin. I interpreted the third and final threat as one that threatened a family member. I decided not to publish it in book form but to keep it online. Feelings were still too raw. Among other things, I had to make a choice between my pathway and my family. If I was going to continue on this path, I had to do it alone and put more space between myself and my family. Bring- ing transparency to the financial coup underway was not their choice. They certainly did not choose to have their lives threatened. In the process of doing more Internet and radio shows, I received repeated requests to provide invest- ment advisory services. In 2007, I started Solari Investment Advisory Services, LLC. For the next ten years, I provided individual investment advisory services and then converted the business to providing ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investment screens to other investment advisors. My first job helping individuals and families was helping people navigate the financial crisis. Wall Street had started to quietly bet against the subprime mortgage market in 2006, with the market col- lapsing in 2007. Events blossomed into the financial crisis in 2008. The leadership who runs the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve brought it up—and then they brought it down. One of the radio shows I was doing regularly was a spot called “Community Business” on Flash-