35 That said, we cannot continue to significantly underperform the benchmark. So, how do you return integrity to the leadership and manage- ment process? That question gets us back to the deep state drain. Private Equity and Venture Funds As central banks have loosened monetary policy, the competition for returns has resulted in an explosion of hedge funds, private equity, and leveraged buyout firms that try to generate both higher returns and fees. This includes moving to the front end of the investment process. They are buying companies before they undertake an IPO. Or they load companies with debt while soaking out their cash in a form of liquidation. Many of those firms are financed by pension funds. I often say, “Why are you financing them, doing things that skim off the front end ahead of what you get?” I suspect they are using the pension funds for, what we used to call “dumb money.” This misuse of pension funds raises the question whether government and pension funds are going to support insiders making above-market returns by lowering total economic returns for all other people. Earning Assumptions Calculations of funding ratios depend on assumptions about future earnings and returns – which means that funding ratios can swing wildly, depending on assumptions about what will happen in the future. Beware presentations too dire or too rosy, based on a swing in assump- tions. Understand that the future is made up of multiple possible scenarios, and we all have a vested interest in helping ensure as healthy an en- vironment, population, and economy as possible. X. THE BOTTOM LINE Let’s bring this down to the bottom line. Let’s do some estimates about the component parts of what I call the financial coup d’état. The bailouts consisted of loans and gifts to banks that had no contractual rights to such largesse. The estimate from the TARP Inspector General was a total of $24 trillion. Before the bailouts we had the pump and dump of the Internet and Telecom stocks – let’s put that at $100 billion. Of course, before that pump and dump we had many decades of narcotics trafficking and relat- ed mortgage and securities fraud. If we want to only go back to Iran Contra, we can add at least another $1 trillion. And then consider the privatization of the reha- bilitation and corrections systems nationwide, beginning in the Clinton administration, whose cost was felt not only in higher government expenditures for their services, but also in the harder-to-calculate effect of an economic system that encouraged the mass incarceration of large segments of our population at enormous ex- pense – destroying not only economic value but hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. Then there are $21 trillion of undocumentable adjustments at HUD and DOD – that is not a sum total inasmuch as documentation is missing for some years at those agencies. And there are another 20 agencies not yet surveyed. Add to this Quantitative Easing. How much did QE I, II and III add? Trillions? This experi- ment in massive monetary intervention also gave the Federal Reserve the ability to purchase at par securities that may be worth much less, even fraudulently issued with shenanigans of the kind we have read about with Wells Fargo. Such secu- rities could be written down into the profits that the Fed would otherwise distribute to Treasury. Then there are reports of hundreds of billions in money missing in Iraq. Then, of course, there is the ongoing black budget, which is not disclosed or disclosed in part only to the House and Senate Intelligence committees and only sometimes. There are also decades of technology transfers of both regular contract budget and black budget government contracts to private companies allowed to own the resulting technology paid for by taxpayers. If you read The Day After Roswell by