Catherine Austin Fitts says the US "dollar syndicate" is preparing to pull 4 billion new investors into Treasuries and the stock market, routed in through dollar stablecoins on apps like Google Pay, Apple Pay and Coinbase.
Central banks and sovereign investors are moving the other way: Norway is selling Treasuries and sovereign bonds, Japan is selling to defend the yen, and the Dutch central bank has pulled 86 tons of gold out of the country and into London.
"This is a system that has been imagined by psychopaths. If you think you can use digital technology to control the universe, you're nuts."
Fitts was a managing director at the investment bank Dillon, Read, served as US Assistant Secretary of Housing under President George H. W. Bush, and by her own account has spent "many decades looking at the black budget" as founder of the Solari Report.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 44 minutes of audio, 16 minutes of reading.
Here are the 16 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Catherine Austin Fitts, former managing director at the investment bank Dillon, Read who served as US Assistant Secretary of Housing under President George H. W. Bush, and founder of the Solari Report
🎙️ Host: Paul Buitink, who has worked at a bank, a credit insurer, gold companies and a Bitcoin exchange, and helped campaign for a full-reserve bank in the Netherlands
📰 Published: 9 September 2026 on YouTube
🔴 YouTube | ⏱️ 44 min | ✅ Time saved: 28 min
Key Takeaways
The US dollar system is trying to pull 4 billion new investors into Treasuries and stocks
Retail money would arrive through stablecoins routed via Google Pay, Apple Pay and Coinbase, starting next year
Central banks and sovereign funds are already doing the opposite of what Washington needs
Norway is selling Treasuries, Japan is selling to defend the yen, and the Dutch central bank moved 86 tons of gold to London
The EU wants household savings pushed from bank deposits into securities to fund a war economy
She said von der Leyen's plan would help finance defense contractors, including Volkswagen's shift into arms
She says Washington misjudged Iran, expecting a quick win that a Starlink outage turned into a stalemate
She claims decades-old "breakthrough energy" is being withheld deliberately, not for lack of capability
She's the most optimistic she's been in 30 years, as more people opt out of centralized systems into cash and entrepreneurship
A single DTC tokenization pilot turned her $4 trillion guardrail bill into a $136 trillion one
The pilot covers $114 trillion of US stocks and bonds; the rewritten bill is called the Clear Act
Every programmable-money system should be required to offer a non-programmed option, she argues
No transaction block should happen without a human explaining the decision to the account holder
Tennessee and Florida already saw a business exodus toward cash-friendly, low-control states, and she expects it again
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's boast about seizing Iranian crypto wallets undercuts Washington's own stablecoin pitch, she said
She frames attempts at total digital control as physically impossible, calling the universe itself "alive"
Her practical advice is to move retirement money out of companies she considers harmful, even gradually
1. State Treasurers Push Back
Fitts opened by recalling a June meeting in the Netherlands with Marlo Oaks, the Utah state treasurer.
Oaks heads an association of roughly 27 conservative-state treasurers who coordinate on policy, and Fitts said "when they act together, they really rock"
She traced her own break with Washington to the same instinct: "Well that's why I got booted out of Washington because the centralizers didn't like my decentralizing solutions"
2. A Closed-Loop Energy War
Paul asked whether the US-Iran conflict and other disruptions reflect a deliberate campaign against oil and gas production.
Solari published an "energy sabotage" timeline and a public PDF on the subject, including an analysis by the UK journalist Richard Medhurst, who she said calls it "a pro gas dollar model" that "significantly reduces economic activity globally"
She said the postwar trading system is closing. "And the Bretton Woods system was an open trade model." It's being replaced, she said, by one where the dollar syndicate is "looking to assert control of energy" — in Ukraine and in the Gulf — "including by shutting down other people's energy capacity"
She calls the underlying shift "COVID 2.0." "I call it COVID 2.0 because you're watching massive shift of market share out of the little guys into the big guys"
She said corporate profits are now roughly double what they were two to three years ago, led by energy exporters "going gang busters"
3. Squeezing the Consumer
Paul asked how the strategy is sustainable when consumers are losing at the pump.
The subsidy that propped up US consumers for decades is unwinding, she said. The US sells Treasury bills to China, hands out the proceeds as government checks, and Americans spend them on Chinese goods — "And that trade is unwinding just like the yen carry trade is unwinding"
She quoted Trump vowing to force the issue rather than defer to the Fed: "I'm going to block all trade. I'm going to embargo trade if the Fed raises interest rates"
Her own reading of the endgame: "They intend to reduce the European and US consumer. They intend to significantly lower their footprint, but then put them in a control grid so that there's no political problem with getting them to go along with that. It's a very ugly picture"
She dismissed the idea that this is politically risky for Republicans, arguing voters end up backing "the uni party" regardless of who is nominally in charge
Paul said it doesn't matter which party runs Washington: "In the end, it's one and the same with the same sponsors, the same people behind it running the show." Fitts agreed the strategy predates any single administration: "And if you look at what Congress is doing, Congress is financing all of this without a peep," despite never voting to authorize the wars the US is fighting
4. Four Billion New Investors
Asked whether US isolation is a risk as other countries trade more among themselves, Fitts described her central thesis.
"I believe that the US dollar syndicate is amassing unbelievable tools to blow the biggest bubble yet. And if they succeed, you're talking about 4 billion new people coming into the Treasury market and the US stock market"
She said the plan is spelled out plainly: "But the US is currently planning on reaching out to retail all around the world and bringing them into both currency, bank deposits and stocks and bonds using the crypto rails." It starts "at the beginning of next year"
She was explicit that the outcome is unknown: "So will it succeed? I don't know. But it's quite ambitious"
5. Institutions Exit, Retail In
Paul cited Norwegian and Dutch pension funds and Japan selling Treasuries, plus the Dutch central bank's gold repatriation.
Paul said the Dutch central bank pulled 86 tons of gold over the past six months — though it moved to London rather than the Netherlands, which he called "not a safe place either"
Fitts said institutions leaving and retail being pulled in are two separate, uncertain bets. "We don't know what's going to happen"
She pointed to a disconnect she says most people miss: 401(k) and IRA holders are often "the lead investors in the data centers" they show up to protest
She described the retail on-ramp as stablecoins sold through everyday payment apps, pointing users toward "these neat digital tokens through Coinbase" to trade stocks
The risk for Washington, in her account: "But if European sovereigns and institutions pull their assets, they could also prohibit retail investors from participating in the stable coin realm"
6. Europe's War-Economy Pivot
Paul cited comments from EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a statistic that US households hold about 60% of assets in stocks and bonds, against 35–36% in Western Europe.
Fitts's read of the plan: "So von der Leyen is saying we need to switch EU family individual deposits out of bank deposits into the securities market." She said it's meant to fund defense contractors and, in her words, "replace the industrial capacity with a war economy" — citing Volkswagen's shift toward arms production
She argued rising stock markets make it politically easier for governments to extract money without objection: "So you can't grift like that unless you can get the model in Europe changed to much more of an equity model"
Asked about a Swedish tax break for domestic stock investment, she said she couldn't find EU-wide specifics yet, but singled out Sweden and the Netherlands for the number of strong companies each has "on a per capita basis"
7. Plunder in Venezuela
Paul asked about the Trump administration's seizure of Venezuelan oil assets.
Fitts's answer was blunt: "It's called plunder. Take it. If you can take it, take it. That's what they're doing"
She placed it inside the same closed-energy strategy: lowering US energy costs while raising China's
8. Iran's Starlink Checkmate
Fitts said Washington badly misjudged its own operation against Iran.
She claimed the US drove down the Iranian currency with a covert operation before the strikes, expecting a fast win. "And I really think they thought a pincer movement of the economic sanctions plus the Palantir Lavender IDF kind of systems and assassinations would really work. And they completely misjudged it"
Her explanation: "And one of the things that's interesting is the Iranians figured out how to cut the Starlink connections and a lot of the invisible weaponry went blind and got stopped. And so there was a real checkmate"
She said Iran is now "dug in for the long term," and that weak reaction in the US bond market makes this contest harder for Washington to simply outspend, as it has past adversaries
9. Exotic Weapons, Old Energy
Asked whether the retail-financing strategy is Washington's only real option, Fitts turned to weapons and energy technology she says is decades old but hidden.
She said the alternative to the retail strategy is "blatant genocide," which she warned would finish destroying the US "brand"
She pointed to this week's Solari Report interview on what she calls "exotic weapons," featuring the researcher Joseph P. Farrell, saying decades spent examining the US "black budget" have convinced her the technology involved is "much greater than what is commonly understood"
Her energy claim: "We know that they have had breakthrough energy for at least a hundred years that we know of." She said it is being withheld on purpose: "I'm confident the United States and many other countries have this energy. They just don't want to make it widely available because it makes it difficult to control"
She floated it, without evidence, as one possible explanation for muted energy prices despite global bottlenecks: "I think there's stuff coming up from underground too"
10. Secret Waivers, Channel War
Asked about draining strategic reserves and tankers running with transponders off, Fitts described what she calls "channel wars."
"The big channel war is how many transactions go through Swift in the US and dollar systems versus how many go through CHIPS or mBridge"
She said public tariff and sanctions announcements mask a separate, secret process of waivers and exemptions, so more trade continues at low or no tariffs than headlines suggest
Despite decades around Washington, including work for the Bush family, she said today's corruption stands out — in her words, it "boggles the imagination" — while insisting the broader economy "is being composted...but it's not collapsing"
11. Tariff Theater, Dog King
On the US-Canada tariff fight, Fitts waved it off as spectacle.
"This is theater. This is clown show." She said the actual oil and gas tariffs are about 10%, and called Trump's "Lake America" and "New America" jokes about Canadian territory part of the same act
She invoked what she called "the dog king" — the legend of a conquered population forced to treat a dog as its ruler — as an analogy for modern politics: "Trump and Biden are both dog kings"
In her account, the bankers started a process in 1995: "Okay, we run monetary policy, but now we want to run fiscal policy as well. We're going to take over fiscal policy." She said achieving that required getting the public "so disgusted" with Congress "that they'll go along"
She described elections, in that light, as "an elite survey" rather than a real choice, and pointed to state legislatures as where citizens retain real leverage
Even so, she said: "This is why right now I'm the most optimistic I've been in 30 years," pointing to more people leaving "the pro- centralization team" to become entrepreneurs. She credited an old line from her former pastor for how she reads the moment: "If we can face it, God can fix it"
She linked the surveillance buildout around data centers to a warning she and the researcher John Titus have made for years: "Gaza is a method and that surveillance technology is being exported globally"
12. The Clear Act's Guardrails
Paul asked about the Clear Act, Solari's push for state-level guardrails on programmable money.
Fitts said Solari runs legislative briefings for state lawmakers on protecting cash and "the analog systems." Utah passed a bill last year and Idaho nearly did, both aimed at the stablecoins expected under the federal GENIUS Act — projections she said put that market at three to four trillion dollars by the end of the decade
The scope changed abruptly, she said, when the Depository Trust Company launched a pilot to tokenize $114 trillion of the stocks and bonds it oversees, on top of big and regional banks moving deposits onto distributed ledgers. In her words: "And now instead of having a $4 trillion, we have a $136 trillion problem." Solari's bill, rewritten to cover securities tokens as well as currency, is now the Clear Act, with a briefing scheduled for September 10
The core guardrail: anyone offered programmable money must also be offered a non-programmed option. "The best one is always cash," though other analog alternatives count
The bill also bars using programmable money's terms and conditions to override constitutional rights. Solari has filed two federal comment letters during the GENIUS Act's rulemaking process, arguing that blocking a transaction can't be an automated decision: "It has to be made by a human and you have to explain what you did and why you did it. There has to be an ability to talk to somebody. It can't just be AI in a data center making these decisions"
A parallel effort she called "absolutely critical" is underway in Switzerland, writing a right to a non-digital life into the constitution, canton by canton
13. Cash Havens, Analog Youth
Asked what happens if the Fed simply stops printing cash, Fitts pointed to state-level competition.
She said Idaho already requires government and government-funded agencies to accept cash, and South Dakota has done the same for school events
She compared it to what she called "the COVID 1.0": a handful of legislators in Tennessee and Florida protected personal freedoms early, and "I mean the economy boomed because big money moved to Tennessee and big money moved to Florida." She expects a similar migration to more than a few states this time
She said Scandinavian central banks that led the original push to eliminate cash have reversed course, citing the risk to payments if the power grid fails during a disaster or war
Generation Z, by contrast, "just don't seem to be interested in cash." She pointed to a counter-trend among some young adults who reject digital systems outright, citing her group's course and growing network for people 18 to 35, now called Solari Builders (formerly Young Builders). She described a Utah coffee shop near the state capitol, staffed entirely by people under 25 who play only vinyl records, telling her "the sound is much better on LPs"
14. Stablecoins Beat Sanctions
Paul asked why Iran and North Korea use US-built stablecoin infrastructure to dodge American sanctions.
Fitts said the contradiction traces to who controls the underlying hardware and software of a distributed ledger, not the currency itself
She singled out Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's own disclosure: "I would say the negative marketing award of the year goes to Scott Bessent...when he said we've seized a billion dollars of Iranian wallets." Her question: "How are you going to market stable coins to the globe when you're pointing that out, Scott?"
On who ultimately wins the stablecoin competition, she said: "But this is going to be decided at the hardware level." She said she doesn't know whether China will build its own CHIPS-style alternative for distributed ledgers
15. A System Run by Psychopaths
Asked who ultimately wins, Fitts turned philosophical.
"I think very long term, I think the people ultimately are going to be the winners cuz I think these guys are just going to mess up beyond belief," calling attempted total digital control "a system that has been imagined by psychopaths"
She argued the ambition is not just misguided but physically impossible, tying it to a broader claim: "99% of the universe is made up of plasma and plasma is alive and intelligent...The universe is alive." As an example of the reach being attempted, she cited sensors being placed in the Amazon that "they think they can digitize the trees and the crops"
She cited a Solari policy statement quoting the computer scientist Alan Kay, asked whether people should be intimidated by AI: "I think we should be intimidated every time we look at a flower"
Asked if she shares the concern of OpenAI researchers about the pace of AI progress, she said, "We're in an out of control space." She offered one theory as an explicit guess, not a claim of fact: "Now, the one thing I will say is in my personal experience, and this is my prejudice, Mr. Global never lets a technology out of the lab until he's figured out how to manage and control it"
She relayed a secondhand claim that the next wave of models, expected after the US election, would "look like a wagon train" next to what's used today. She compared the moment to "giving laser guns to cavemen," adding: "And the question is how many people will we kill?"
16. Coming Clean, Your Money
On practical steps, Fitts urged listeners to check where their own money is invested.
She described underwriting a small community bank in "the heartland" for one of Solari's investment screens, with an unusually strong board: "what a gem, what a gem" — contrasting it with people who protest companies while their retirement savings are invested in them
She recalled a Washington congressman dismissing a street protest below his office window: "Let's face it, honey. As long as they have a Citibank credit card in the back pocket, what do I care if they walk up and down?"
Solari is publishing a third-quarter article on moving 401(k) and IRA money out of companies she considers harmful, alongside its existing "Coming Clean" guide
She said the shift doesn't have to be total to matter: "It's not zero one. You go from 0 to 1% to 2%...I started coming clean in 1998 and I'm still doing it," and called a shift of even half of most people's holdings out of centralizing companies "a revolution"
Bonus Insights
Paul said he has never exposed his own children to social media or the internet, offering it as his own example of a non-digital life
Fitts said she has "one subscriber" she tells a story to each week about the great companies within Solari's coverage that most investors overlook while funding "the worst companies" instead
Fitts's bottom line is that the dollar system's near-term survival now depends on persuading billions of retail investors worldwide to do voluntarily, through stablecoins and crypto apps, what sovereign institutions are increasingly declining to do themselves.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Solari Report (Fitts's own investment newsletter and research operation — the source of the energy-sabotage timeline, the Clear Act legislation and her company-level investment screens)
Depository Trust Company (Its pilot to tokenize $114 trillion of US stocks and bonds is what turned her $4 trillion stablecoin guardrail bill into a $136 trillion one)
Coinbase (One of the platforms she says is being used to route retail investors into US stocks through crypto rails)
Solari Builders (Formerly Young Builders — Solari's course and growing network for people 18 to 35 that Fitts credits with an "analog," anti-surveillance streak)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Coming Clean: Building a Wonderful World – Catherine Austin Fitts and the Solari Team (Her guide to moving money, attention and time out of companies she says are "poisoning" their customers)
GENIUS Act (The federal stablecoin law Solari's Clear Act model legislation is designed to put guardrails around)
Financial Transaction Freedom – Solari Report (Hosts the Clear Act model legislation and the GENIUS Act rulemaking comment letters Fitts said Solari filed)
Exotic Weapons, Hidden Networks, Covert Wars, and 9/11 with Dr. Joseph P. Farrell – Solari Report (The interview she referenced when discussing "exotic weapons" and the black budget)
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