Follow the Money: The Complex Case of the Government’s “Missing” Trillions

~hehe FOLKS ...where IS all the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ ...going ?  TRILLIONS FOLKS ...fucking TRILLLLLLLIONS !!!!  ...people WE got plenty of $ in THIS COUNTRY !!!  ...IT'S just NOT fer U & me ?   ....where's all the $$$ ...folks ...it just goes ...poffffffffffffffffff  HUh ? ...yea right  ....you just try & make some go .....pufffffffffff     & see how fucking FAST ole bond ....james bond swooooooppppps down in a black heleecopter on yer ass  ???     TRILLIONS   folks    ,  fucking trillions ...puff?  yep yup ummmmhummm just an ....clitch !?! accounting error yeah fucking a ....right 

Micah Hanks March 21, 2019

• https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/03/follow-the-money-the-complex-case-of-the-governments-missing-trillions/

For the last several years, the U.S. federal budget has generally been between about $3.6 and $3.8 trillion, comprising close to 21 percent of the total economy in terms of GDP. All federal spending falls into one of three groups, which include mandatory and discretionary spending (more than 90% of all federal spending falls into these two categories) as well as interest on debt the country owes, according to the National Priorities Project website.

Naturally, a large portion of government spending is put toward defense budgets every year, with the DOD budget totaling around 15% of the total federal budget in recent years (and it’s expected to be higher this year, with a proposed $681.1 billion proposed by Donald Trump for the fiscal year 2019). 

What this money is used for is, of course, an entirely different story. However, in recent years there have been questions raised as to not just how the money is used, but also whether large amounts are effectively being “hidden” by the U.S. government. 

The question goes all the way back to 2001, when then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shared details about a curious predicament during a Congressional hearing. “According to some estimates,” Rumsfeld said, “we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it’s stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.” 

In essence, Rumsfeld seemed to be saying that the Department of Defense had effectively “lost” $2.3 trillion in transactions. The timing of the statement–one day prior to the September 11 terror attacks–made it particularly notable among conspiracy theorists, an unfortunate stigma that has not helped in bringing credible attention to an otherwise appalling accounting “discrepancy,” if that’s even an appropriate way to refer to a government agency being unable to account for $2.3 trillion. 

Due in part to this and other problems, “As a result, DoD has developed a credibility problem with Congress, OMB, the General Accounting Office (GAO) and itself, when it comes to financial information,” one 2001 report stated.

Rumsfeld’s admission before Congress wasn’t a one-time affair, either. Over the ensuing years, several similar instances involving apparent transactional discrepancies have occurred, totaling as much as $21 trillion by some estimates. In a recent article appearing in Forbes, Boston University professor of economics Laurence Kotlikoff and Mark Skidmore, a Professor of Economics at Michigan State University, argue that the ongoing problem, while having been acknowledged by the various government branches, remains to be satisfactorily accounted for. 

Kotlikoff and Skidmore write: 

The DOD’s (Department of Defense) as well as HUD’s (Department of Housing and Urban Development) Offices of Inspector General (OIG) reference these transactions as “unsupported journal voucher adjustments.” This is polite accounting language for lost, hidden or stolen money. If such “adjustments” were small, it would be one thing. But they totaled some $21 trillion between 1998 and 2015!

The article, the second in a two-part series that looks at this problem, is based on a report co-authored by Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts, president of Solari, Inc., publisher of the Solari Report, and managing member of Solari Investment Advisory Services, LLC. It is worth noting that Fitts has a very interesting background beyond her financial consulting, which includes having written about past experiences that involved a military think tank inviting her to work on a project aimed at effectively “disclosing” to the general public that an extraterrestrial presence exists on Earth. Fitts has also appeared in recent years as a guest on the popular late night radio program Coast to Coast AM, as well as Alex Jones’ InfoWars. Prior to any of this, she had been an Assistant Secretary of that the Department of Housing and Urban Development under George H. W. Bush, and later the lead financial advisor to the Federal Housing Administration, at which time she first became aware of such accounting discrepancies. 

Kotlikoff, Skidmore, and Fitts aren’t the only ones aware of this problem; in fact, it was addressed by David Norquist, Comptroller for the Department of Defense, last January during a Congressional hearing on the process of the Pentagon’s congressionally-mandated first internal, consolidated financial audit, overseen by Bernie Sanders and several other members of Senate. At that time, Norquist referred again to the “unsupported adjustments,” citing them as the underlying source of the confusion. Skidmore and Kotlikoff noted in their Forbes piece, “Though it is not entirely clear from his testimony, it seems Mr. Norquist is suggesting that changes in the valuation of property and equipment due to depreciation, base closures, equipment becoming obsolete, etc. are leading to enormous undocumentable adjustments.” 

However, Norquist’s explanation fell a few marks short of being satisfactory for Kotlikoff and Skidmore. “To our knowledge,” they wrote, “there are no public reports with detailed explanations or additional data. Furthermore, the DOD’s OIG’s failure to respond to reasonable inquiries and Mr. Norquist’s clearly inadequate explanation suggests our government accountants can’t figure out what’s going on when it comes to trillions in ‘unsupported’ outlays/transactions.” 

It might be fair to say that the official explanations that have been offered allow for more than a little “wiggle room.”  However, there have been questions raised about the Kotlikoff and Skidmore’s interpretation too, namely by Mick West over at Metabunk.org, who correctly notes that it would be tricky for trillions to go missing from an annual budget that receives only several billions of dollars in the first place. 

As West points out: 

[T]he Pentagon’s budget is around $600 billion. A measurable percentage of the Pentagon’s budget is not $6.5 Trillion. That’s ten times the amount of money that went into the Pentagon that year, and they still had to run the military. Clearly it’s impossible to both spend most of the money you’ve been given, and also lose ten times that amount.

West doesn’t dispute that some problems do probably exist with the Pentagon’s budget. “Nobody is saying that the defense department does not waste money,” West wrote. “It very obviously does. Hundreds of millions, possibly even billions of dollars are wasted through inefficiencies, incompetence, and corruption. It is probably a measurable percentage of the Pentagon’s budget.”

West further argues that one of the biggest issues with the idea that tens of trillions of dollars are being “hidden” is the way the information appears to be used to justify other unsubstantiated claims, or as West says, “to legitimize implausible conspiracy theories like 9/11 controlled demolitions or even chemtrails.” 

There doesn’t appear to be any indication that Kotlikoff or Skidmore are among those who endorse 9/11 conspiracies. However, Fitts has been a proponent of such ideas, having once served on the board of 911truth.org, and writing articles (like this one) which questioned the official 9/11 narrative. 

That said, even if Kotlikoff and Skidmore were completely wrong in their assessment, this doesn’t remove the fact that there are remaining credibility issues pertaining to the DoD and its treatment of publicly disclosed data that should raise questions. For instance, a recent document referenced by the authors in their Forbes article, which provided a summary of unsupported adjustments for the fiscal year of 2017 appeared in redacted form, obscuring the actual amounts. “That is, all the relevant information was blacked out,” Kotlikoff notes. “We believe the redactions are the direct results of our exposing this issue. That exposure was significant.” In previous years, there had never been similar redactions of this information. 

If the budgetary questions being addressed here are purely the result of a misunderstanding, it is unclear why the DoD would have been so hesitant to address queries the likes of those made by Kotlikoff and Skidmore. This is further complicated by the fact that the recent fiscal summaries they reference featured redactions, unlike past reports. Even if the idea of several trillions of dollars being hidden by our government stands on shaky ground, there is still plenty to justify calls for greater transparency… something we only seem to be getting less of over time. 

AFTER A LONG HIATUS, ANOTHER SUSPICIOUS BANKER DEATH…

https://gizadeathstar.com/2019/03/after-a-long-hiatus-another-suspicious-banker-death/

You may recall that many months ago there was a spate of bankers dying under suspicious circumstances, while jogging, or "falling" (or being pushed) in front of trains, falling onto piked fences, jumping off of roofs, being shot in their cars, and so on. That pattern of strange deaths followed a spate of similar unusual deaths of so-called "homeopathic" doctors, which followed, years before that, a kill-off of biologists and geneticists, and if we want to go all the way back to the Reagan era, a spate of mysterious and suspicious deaths of high energy physicists.

Mr. S.D. noticed this article by Pam Martens, however, and passed it along, and yes, there's been another odd banker death:

JPMorgan Managing Director Dies Suddenly; Has Links to Other JPM Deaths

The interesting thing about this death (and the article covering the story) is that it puts us in a better position to speculate about what may be going on. The death itself concerns Mr. Douglas Arthur Carucci.  And like many of the other suspicious banker deaths, he was involved in the information systems end of the banking business:

A 2015 bio that Carucci provided for a talk he was giving at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India, described his career as follows:

“Head of CEM Electronic Trading Technology at JP Morgan Chase, covering FX [foreign exchange], Commodities, and Emerging Markets. Mr. Carucci is responsible for a global team of engineers developing low latency trading technology. He began his career on Wall Street developing options trading systems while in high school and in the AMEX options pits while attending college. He spent 10 years building proprietary trading systems for FX and Interest Rates derivatives on Wall Street. Mr. Carucci served as Managing Director and Partner at Citadel Investment Group in Chicago for 10 years where he led the architecture and development of analytics and risk management systems across all business lines. He launched Citadel’s European Options Market Making and High Frequency trading business in London. He joined Sun Trading LLC in 2009 as head of Volatility Trading and lead the firm’s Quantitative Research group. Mr. Carucci received his degree in Finance from Baruch, City University of New York.”

While there has been nearly a complete news blackout on Carucci’s death, he shared common links to two other high profile deaths of JPMorgan Chase computer executives which were widely covered by global media outlets. Carucci knew a great deal about JPMorgan Chase’s technology infrastructure – putting him in a rarefied category at the bank – and he had previously worked in London. Both of those traits were also present in Julian Knott and Gabriel McGee – men whom it is likely that Carucci knew and/or interacted with prior to their own “tragic” deaths. (Italicized emphases added)

I have blogged, and talked, about my suspicions about the flash crashes, and other strange market behavior, and my chief concerns about algorithmic trading have boiled down to two points: (1) with volume and speed of trading that computerized trading makes possible, markets are no longer genuinely reflective of actual human trading, and this in turn affects the pricing mechanisms and risk assessments that humans use to calculate and weigh their investment alternatives; it badly skews the information; and (2) such computer algorithmic trading makes it possible to execute massive trades in a short amount of time, making lots of money for those able to execute such trades, massively increasingly liquidity in the system for the few able to do so. I will now share another high octane speculation I've had about the flash crashes, and that I've never shared before: what if they were tests to see how far algorithmic trading systems could go or be pressed before the automatic safeguards kicked in and trades were voided? Put differently, how far could markets be manipulated before such manipulation became "visible" to the human technocrats designing the architecture?

This brings us back to the italicized points emphasized in the quotation from the article above, for note what we have:

1) Someone involved in designing algorithmic trading systems for options;

2) Someone involved in designing proprietary algorithmic trading systems for FX, or foreign exchange, i.e., currency exchange, speculation, and trading;

3) Someone involved in designing algorithmic trading systems for interest rate derivatives(!);

4) Someone involved in designing computer systems to analyze and assess risk "across all business lines," i.e., systems applicable to the entire spectrum of trading, from commodities, foreign exchange, equities, securities, and so on;

5) Someone who had been employed both in London and New York and who knew "a great deal about JP Morgan Chase's technology infrastructure."

Such an individual would be perfectly positioned to notice the deliberate manipulation of algorithmic trading for any purpose, and would also be perfectly positioned to observe "data correlations" of market activity with, say, political news, money laundering, currency or securities speculation, commodities movements, human trafficking... you name it. Additionally, because of his expertise, he would not only know what to look for, but what kinds of evidence to gather. And to round out this picture, he would also be in a position to detect hidden or unauthorized modification of the technology infrastructure by sources unknown, from external state actors to any other group, and to track what may really have happened to all that bailout money.

As the article alludes, an early speculation on why so many bankers - especially those with connections to information technology - were dying was that banks were simply "offing" them to collect on their BOLIs, Bank-Owned Life Insurance Policies. But, when compared to the numbered inventory outlined above, such a view really pales into insignificance when compared to the information potentially available to such people, and to the possibility that they saw or suspected something massive, and massively criminal, was taking place.

Ms. Martens begins her article  with a strange series of conclusions, which to my mind seem to highlight these types of possibilities:

When you are the largest bank in the United States and you’ve been compared to the Gambino crime family in a book by two trial lawyers; when you’ve pleaded guilty to three criminal felony counts brought by the United States Justice Department in the past five years; when you’ve paid over $30 billion in fines over charges of crimes against the public and investors since 2008; and when you’ve had an unprecedented string of employees leaping to their death from buildings, dropping dead at home or on the street, and two alleged murder-suicides by employees — all in just the past five years – one might think that law enforcement might show some interest – especially since this employer – JPMorgan Chase – holds tens of billions of dollars of Bank-Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) on its workers. (This death benefit, by the way, pays tax-free to the corporation, not the employee’s family.)

But when it comes to JPMorgan Chase and law enforcement, there does not seem to be a morsel of curiosity over the continuing sudden deaths of its computer technology workers – no matter how high up the corporate ladder they rank or how many floors they are alleged to fall to their death.

While BOLI policies might be involved, I cannot help but think that this, for whomever is ordering these deaths, is merely the side benefit, but not the ultimate motivations for their actions. The real motivations lie, I strongly suspect, much deeper. Like Ms. Martens, I have to wonder why no agency or journalistic effort has been made to investigate the story, and I suspect that no investigation will be done, and that, once again, it will fall to the alternative research field to do so.