global geopolitics

An independent reading of Catherine Austin Fitts’s account of central bank injections, small business closures, and the new billionaires

Editorial Analysis | October 2026

The interview with Catherine Austin Fitts constructs a single integrated argument about monetary power rather than a collection of separate observations. Fitts begins from the claim that central bankers met at Jackson Hole in the summer of 2019 and reviewed a plan prepared by retired central bankers under the auspices of the BlackRock Investment Institute. The plan carried the name Going Direct Reset and described a method for injecting central bank money directly into non-depository institutions rather than through the reserve system. Fitts treats this meeting as the moment when a periodic currency reset entered its implementation phase, noting that the central banking system resets every eighty to one hundred and twenty years by evolving or replacing the currency. The historical comparison she offers is institutional rather than decorative, because it frames the 2019 meeting as the opening of a cycle that would culminate in a change to the monetary unit itself. Her argument therefore links a documented policy discussion to a longer pattern of monetary regime change that has repeatedly accompanied major redistributions of financial power.

The technical content of going direct deserves careful reconstruction because it explains how liquidity reached institutions that sit outside the commercial banking system. Under conventional practice the Federal Reserve adds money by crediting reserves held at depository institutions, and those banks then decide whether to lend into the wider economy. Going direct bypassed that intermediate step by purchasing securities from non-depository institutions, which meant that the central bank dealt directly with asset managers and funds rather than with ordinary banks. Fitts reports that after the September 2019 market interventions and the pandemic announcement the Federal Reserve injected between five and six trillion dollars through this channel. She cites a former Undersecretary of the Treasury who told Swiss investors that enormous inflation was baked into the cake and would not be felt immediately, which she treats as evidence that the designers understood the eventual price consequences.

The reason inflation did not appear immediately, in Fitts’s account, was the deflationary shock produced by pandemic lockdowns and by the designation of certain businesses as non-essential while others remained open. Closing Main Street while leaving publicly traded companies open shifted enormous market share from small firms to large corporations and consolidated economic activity into fewer and larger hands. Fitts cites estimates that thirty-five per cent of American small businesses shut down, with San Francisco reaching forty-nine per cent, and that five hundred new billionaires were created worldwide. Those figures describe a transfer of wealth from proprietors and wage earners toward the owners of financial assets, which is precisely the redistribution that a liquidity injection into asset markets would be expected to produce. Her conclusion that the pandemic was substantially designed to implement the reset using health policy as an excuse follows from the alignment between the liquidity mechanism and the observed pattern of consolidation.

The interview then extends the analysis to the productive base on which dollar power rests, beginning with the claim that the United States and China are mutually dependent but asymmetrically so. China built export markets away from the United States and reduced its relative exposure, while American dependence on Chinese imports is so deep that Tennessee would shut down without them. Fitts asserts that American investment and intellectual capital transfer built Chinese industrial capacity, and she describes government operations in which Chinese teams spent months absorbing everything their American counterparts possessed. The financial coup she dates to fiscal 1998, when the head of CalPERS told her that the largest pension fund in the country had given up on the country and was moving its money to Asia. Money disappeared from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Defense while Carlyle, a firm almost nobody had heard of, suddenly possessed a billion dollars for Chinese investment. Her image of Siamese twins who punch each other while remaining joined at the hip captures the combination of strategic rivalry and productive integration that characterises the relationship.

Deutsche Bank’s agreement to run an exchange on the Chinese currency, which Fitts assumes will operate on the SIP system that alternatives to SWIFT provide, indicates that the dollar’s payment monopoly is being contested at the infrastructure level. The significance of alternative rails lies in the fact that control over the channel through which trade is settled has historically been as important as control over the currency in which trade is denominated. Her claim that the people managing the global economy are purposely bringing China up therefore describes a managerial strategy rather than a diplomatic accident.

Fitts then turns to the mechanisms through which the dollar system is being extended rather than defended, and her account centres on stablecoins, digital tokens, and tokenised securities. Her claim is that these instruments are designed to raise the American share of global equity markets from seventy per cent to ninety per cent and to bring four billion people out of local currencies and into the dollar. The Genius Act passed last year created the regulatory infrastructure for this expansion, and Fitts explains that a Treasury bill functions as a currency because stablecoins must be backed by dollar assets. She draws the consequence directly, arguing that an Argentine who buys a stablecoin is financing the American military apparatus that constrains his own country. Her projection of four trillion dollars in stablecoins by the end of the decade, with issuance beginning in early 2027, describes an ambition to move populations off local currencies and out of local banks.

The Iranian example illustrates both the incentive and the limit of dollarisation, because the rial fell ninety-four per cent against the dollar during the covert operation and Iranians had reason to seek stablecoin shelter. Fitts notes that the Secretary of the Treasury then announced the seizure of a billion dollars of Iranian wallets, which demonstrates that dollarised money remains subject to American jurisdiction and sanctions enforcement. Her account of the Depository Trust Company’s plans to issue digital tokens for stocks and bonds, enabling twenty-four-hour global trading of the American market with twenty times leverage at some firms, describes a speculative architecture of unprecedented reach. She compares this to sports betting and prediction markets and argues that the tools now being assembled are capable of inflating a bubble larger than any she has witnessed in a long career.

The Treasury market analysis in the interview explains why dollarisation is a necessity for the American state rather than a simple opportunity for its financial firms. Institutions around the world are rejecting Treasuries because the twenty-year Treasury ETF has performed badly against gold and stocks while equities are pumped by subsidy and government contracts. Fitts describes Treasuries as the workhorse that supplies the money for stock market inflation while the workhorse itself is being drained, which explains why ten-year and thirty-year yields have entered the danger zone. The response is to reach four billion retail buyers abroad through stablecoins and digital tokens, and Fitts warns that the same train tracks can place American and global farmers in a debt trap. Argentina’s currency has fallen ninety-nine per cent over a decade and ninety-three per cent over five years, which creates the incentive to exit the peso for dollar instruments. Japan, as the largest sovereign holder of Treasuries, has been downsizing under energy pressure, and the American authorities do not want Japanese sales to push the bond market away from them. Fitts explains that giving Japan access to the Federal Reserve’s repo facility allows Tokyo to post Treasuries for overnight money rather than sell them into an already fragile market.

Her account of American war strategy integrates the physical and financial dimensions in a way that explains apparently inconclusive military outcomes. Since the Second World War the United States has fought physical wars for the profits of weapons production while pursuing economic victory through exhaustion, resource control, and institutional dominance of markets. Iraqi oil revenues are deposited at the New York Fed and Venezuelan oil revenues at the Treasury, which means that apparent strategic losses preserved financial control over the underlying resources. The objective she identifies is the conversion of the petrodollar into a petrogas dollar through control of trade routes and energy resources, and American LNG sales since the war began support that reading. Gulf producers are being squeezed while American gas exports surge, and the same logic extends to the effort to bring Iran and the BRIC countries onto an American-controlled payment grid. The G20 meeting in 2024 produced pledges of allegiance to central bank digital currencies and digital identities, even as China and Russia sought to control their own versions of those systems. Fitts argues that the control apparatus being built for Iran is simultaneously being built for domestic populations, because many citizens also resist being managed by automated systems. The data centre capacity under construction serves spatial and transactional control over the entire dollar system rather than merely the computational needs of American firms.

The construction of that control grid proceeds through prototyping and persuasion rather than open coercion, according to Fitts’s account of how financial institutions operate. Talented software developers would refuse to build a control grid if asked directly, but they will build one when persuaded that the tool will make everybody free and earn them a fortune. The danger she identifies is not another speculative bubble but the completion of a fully digital system in which every transaction can be conditioned, blocked, or seized. Her observation that the true cost of inflation appears in the time budgets of ordinary people connects monetary policy to the daily experience of institutional interruption and administrative burden. Automation pushes work back onto individuals and forces them to absorb the failures of institutional systems, which shrinks the effective freedom that productivity gains might otherwise deliver.

The resistance programme she proposes is defensive and legislative rather than revolutionary, and it focuses on preserving non-programmable alternatives within the payment system. Her model legislation contains three elements, namely a state requirement to accept cash, a right to a non-digital life in dealings with government, and guardrails on programmable money framed as consumer protection. Cash preserves the local multiplier because a hundred dollars spent in a neighbourhood remains a hundred dollars after a hundred transactions, whereas digital intermediation removes value at every step. Cash also functions when electricity fails during cyclones, floods, and other disasters, and Scandinavian central banks have reportedly recognised that eliminating it was a mistake. Complete financial transaction control requires the elimination of analog alternatives, which is why the preservation of cash and cheques constrains the reach of programmable money. People sensitive to electromagnetic fields cannot use digital equipment without pain, and their needs provide a public health argument for maintaining non-digital channels.

The interview’s treatment of gold, land, and digital assets supports its broader claim that the financial system is being rebalanced rather than simply inflated. Central banks have been buying gold steadily, and Fitts interprets this as a rebalancing of reserves from the G7 toward Asia and as the construction of a more balanced foundation for the next system. The top hundred landowners in America doubled their holdings between 2008 and 2017, which suggests that sophisticated holders were buying real assets rather than digital tokens. Fitts expects XRP and Ripple to be important to the new payment rails while treating Bitcoin as an inefficient payment system that functions as a speculative asset without fundamental utility. Her concern that Bitcoin may be distributed to sovereign governments so that large holders can exit reflects a reading of market structure rather than a prediction about prices. Money withdrawn from official American accounts has been reinvested in offshore havens and in what she calls a breakaway civilisation with separate legal rules and substantial hidden infrastructure.

Breakthrough energy technology, modular nuclear plants, and advanced materials form the final element of her account because they explain why the managers fear abundance. Technology capable of sharply reducing energy costs has existed for a century, and the former head of Lockheed Skunk Works said in 1996 that the technology to take extraterrestrials home already existed. Such technology would destroy the asset values embedded in pension funds and energy holdings, which gives the managers of those funds a material interest in slowing its deployment. A project in the 1990s that identified large wealth gains from re-optimising the economy through markets and meritocracy was set aside because the existing managers would lose control. The outcome was to dumb everybody down and take tight control, which Fitts presents as the political choice that produced the present surveillance architecture. Her final judgement is that this reset differs from earlier ones because it aims to end currency altogether and replace it with a control system. Gold will serve as a wholesale settlement foundation without becoming a retail gold standard, and the result is a system that possesses accounting units but not genuinely circulating currency.

A materialist reading of the interview locates its central insight in the class content of monetary intervention rather than in the intentions of individual officials. The direct injection of five to six trillion dollars socialised liquidity risk while leaving investment decisions in private hands, which transferred losses to the public and gains to asset owners. Closing Main Street transferred market share to large corporations and converted small proprietors into a dispossessed intermediate class, which is accumulation by dispossession in its pandemic form. Stablecoin dollarisation extends the same logic internationally by drawing peripheral households into dollar liabilities and exposing their labour to American monetary policy and sanctions. Treasury market stress and the search for foreign retail buyers reveal the fiscal limits of the imperial state and the pressure to innovate new mechanisms for financing its deficits. The repo facility for Japan coordinates the interests of advanced capitalist states against bond market disorder while preserving the hierarchy of the dollar system. Programmable money and digital identity constitute the political form of financialised monopoly capitalism, because surveillance enables labour discipline and the extraction of rent from every transaction. The resistance programme of cash, analog rights, and state guardrails is a defensive democratic demand that socialists should support while recognising its limits within a property-owning framework. A transformative programme would connect these demands to public banking, democratic control of monetary policy, capital controls, and decommodified payment infrastructure. The interview’s documentation of elite strategy provides material for that programme even where its explanatory framework remains individualist rather than structural.

The most plausible trajectory consistent with the interview’s evidence involves continued dollar dominance moderated by incremental diversification and persistent bond market stress. Stablecoins will expand retail dollar access while central banks build wholesale digital infrastructure for cross-border settlement among themselves. Fiscal deficits will keep the Treasury dependent on foreign retail demand and on repo arrangements that prevent allied holders from selling into fragile markets. Regulatory contests over stablecoin reserves, sanctions compliance, and programmable features will determine whether dollarisation strengthens American power or creates new private vulnerabilities. The struggle over cash and analog access will produce meaningful local protections without reversing the broader digitisation of payments and identity. Whether the control grid becomes total or remains contested depends on the capacity of organised citizens to defend non-programmable alternatives and to demand democratic control over the monetary and technological infrastructure on which their lives depend.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

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References

1. The Going Direct Reset and Jackson Hole 2019

BlackRock Investment Institute. (2019). Going direct: How central banks could deal with the next downturn. BlackRock. https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/literature/whitepaper/bii-macro-perspectives-august-2019.pdf

Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. (2019). Challenges for monetary policy: A symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 22–24, 2019. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/jackson-hole-economic-symposium/economic-symposium-conference-proceedings/

Powell, J. H. (2019). *Challenges for monetary policy: Remarks at the “Challenges for Monetary Policy” symposium, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 23, 2019. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20190823a.htm

2. Federal Reserve Balance Sheet Expansion and Direct Credit Facilities

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2020–2021). H.4.1: Factors affecting reserve balances of depository institutions and condition statement of Federal Reserve Banks [Weekly statistical releases]. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2020). Financial stability report, November 2020. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/financial-stability-report.htm

Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (2020). Treasury market liquidity and early lessons from the pandemic shock*l (L. K. Logan, Remarks before the Money Marketeers of New York University, December 1, 2020). https://www.newyorkfed.org/newsevents/speeches/2020/log201201

3. Small Business Closure and Pandemic Consolidation

Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Hendren, N., Stepner, M., & the Opportunity Insights Team. (2020). The economic impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a new public database built using private sector data. Opportunity Insights, Harvard University. https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/tracker/

World Economic Forum. (2021, 5 May). 34% of America’s small businesses are still closed due to COVID-19: Here’s why it matters. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/small-business-closures-covid-19-opportunity-insights/

4. Stablecoin Legislation and Tokenisation of Securities

United States Congress. (2025). Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, Pub. L. No. 119-27, 139 Stat. 419 (2025). https://www.congress.gov/119/plaws/publ27/PLAW-119publ27.htm

Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. (2025, 11 December). DTCC authorized to offer new tokenization service, paving the way to tokenized DTC-custodied assets [Press release]. https://www.dtcc.com/press-releases/2025/paving-the-way-to-tokenized-dtc-custodied-assets

US Securities and Exchange Commission, Division of Trading and Markets. (2025, 11 December). No-action letter regarding The Depository Trust Company’s tokenization service. https://www.sec.gov/

5. Treasury Market, Foreign Holdings, and the FIMA Repo Facility

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2021, 28 July). Statement regarding repurchase agreement arrangements [FOMC statement establishing the standing domestic repo facility and the FIMA repo facility]. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20210728a.htm

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2022, 24 March). Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) Repo Facility. https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fima-repo-facility.htm

US Department of the Treasury. (2024–2025). Treasury International Capital (TIC) system: Major foreign holders of Treasury securities [Monthly releases]. https://ticdata.treasury.gov/

6. Alternative Payment Rails and Renminbi Internationalisation

Financial Times. (2026, 11 August). Deutsche becomes first European clearing bank for renminbi. https://www.ft.com/

Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS). (2015–present). CIPS direct participants and operational documentation. https://www.cips.com.cn/

7. Central Bank Gold Purchases and Reserve Rebalancing

World Gold Council. (2024, 31 January). Gold demand trends full year 2023: Central banks. https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/gold-demand-trends/gold-demand-trends-full-year-2023/central-banks

World Gold Council. (2023). 2023 central bank gold reserves survey. https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/2023-central-bank-gold-reserves-survey

8. Catherine Austin Fitts: Institutional Biography and Primary Testimony

United States Senate. (1989). Nomination of Catherine Austin Fitts to be Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Housing [Hearing record and biographical materials]. https://www.congress.gov/

Fitts, C. A., & Skidmore, M. (2017). The missing money: $21 trillion in unauthorized federal spending. Solari. https://solari.com/

9. Programmable Money, Cash, and Analog Rights

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2022). Money and payments: The U.S. dollar in the age of digital transformation. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/money-and-payments-discussion-paper.htm

Bank for International Settlements. (2021). CBDCs: An opportunity for the monetary system (Annual Economic Report, Chapter III). https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2021e3.htm

Group of Twenty. (2024). G20 roadmap for cross-border payments: 2024 progress report. https://www.g20.org/