Government Loses $21 Trillion….Yes….$21 Trillion

Just when you reach the point where you think there’s nothing left out of government that can still surprise you, news breaks that they’ve lost $21 trillion.

Yes. You heard that correctly. $21 trillion.

Not $21 million, or $21 billion. But $21 trillion.

Michigan State PhD economist Dr. Mark Skidmore and economist Catherine Austin Fitts have both gone through the numbers and come up with $21 trillion of undocumented adjustments between the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

If you have not yet heard Skidmore’s interview with Greg Hunter of USA Watchdog, it’s truly stunning and worth your time. Because when you hear a number like $21 trillion it’s easy to dismiss it out of hand while thinking it’s simply not possible.

However listening to even a few minutes of the interview quickly reveals that Dr. Skidmore meticulously crunched the numbers and came back with stunning results. In fact it’s worth noting that when he first heard of a missing $21 trillion from Fitts, he actually didn’t believe it could be true and was aiming to disprove the report.

Yet just like how all of the political speeches in the world don’t change the numbers behind the U.S. fiscal and monetary problems, Dr. Skidmore found the numbers in this case also painted a clear picture.

Now if you were expecting the government to somehow explain the situation, just wait until you hear what else Dr. Skidmore reported. Apparently, rather than launching any sort of investigation, so far all the government has done is to remove the documents Skidmore cited from their website.

At this point news of fraudulent accounting out of the government hardly raises an eyebrow anymore. Yet just the sheer magnitude of the amount of money that has gone missing is beyond belief.

Amazingly enough there actually is a precedent for the military announcing large amounts of unexplained missing money. You may recall that on September 10, 2001 Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon had lost $2.3 trillion. Yet with the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks occurring the next day, the story quietly faded away.

But now there’s an even bigger missing sum of money which is startling and disturbing to say the least. Even aside from how ridiculous it is that the government could lose $21 trillion and then remove the evidence, what does it say about the numbers the Federal Reserve has been producing about the money supply?

Currently the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve lists the monetary base at right around $4 trillion. Yet if $21 trillion has now gone missing, wouldn’t this have to at least call into question how much money is really out there?

I emailed Dr. Skidmore to see if he feels that these are comparable terms, and even he couldn’t figure out the answer to that. Yet however one looks at the monetary accounting, it makes you wonder how much money has really been created. And whether the Fed has been anywhere close to honest in disclosing the real amount. It also makes you wonder what other piles of money have gone missing that we still have yet to find out about.

So if you bought precious metals as insurance against government monetary and fiscal ineptitude, the case for a bright future is still very much intact. Any rational argument that could have been made that the government and Fed have a handle on the situation has become difficult to imagine. While the reasons to own precious metals just continue to grow.

~Chris Marcus