isen.blog

Catherine Austin Fitts is one of the best financial thinkers I've met. She sees "How money works," and her sensible explanations illuminate some dark corners. Unfortunately, she's going on trial tomorrow. The trial is to resolve an eight-year-old civil suit that comes directly from her efforts to open up the system by which distressed U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) real estate loans are re-sold to private parties.

Her company, Hamilton Securities, developed information technology to measure the "gross neighborhood product" of a non-performing loan's neighborhood. (This had never been done. Previously (and since) good ol' boys used their back-room intuition to determine the value of such loans.) Then Hamilton would, for one example, support a neighborhood start-up to do data transcription, and -- guess what -- the gross neighborhood product went up! And the non-performing loan could be sold for more. (And the people who lived there could make a living previously only available to drug dealers.)

Fitts says that Hamilton put over US$2 billion back into "the pockets of U.S. tax payers." And took same out of the pockets of the good ol' vultures that hover over HUD. Which is the reason for this suit, which I expect the court will finally find utterly bogus.