126 THE BiG DROP
I was fortunate enough to participate in a financial war
game that was conducted in 2009. I was invited by the
Pentagon to be a facilitator and a planner for it. Of course,
the Pentagon, our Defense Department, had been doing war
games forever. They didn’t need any help from me in terms of
a traditional war game.
But this was the first financial war game ever done. The
weapons were non-kinetic meaning nothing that would shoot
or explode. We could only use stocks, bonds, currencies, de-
rivatives and commodities. We had some of the usual teams as
you might imagine.
There was a U.S. team, a Russian team, a Chinese team
and so forth. We also had a team of banks and hedge funds
because they’re very important players in the space as well.
We spent days, months really, designing this and played it
out over a couple of days in March 2009, at a top secret weap-
ons laboratory outside of Washington — the applied physics
laboratory.
What was interesting was one of the scenarios that I intro-
duced myself. Some colleagues, who were playing as the Russian
and Chinese teams would get together, pool their gold and issue
a new currency backed by that gold. Of course, we had the gold
in a Swiss vault and the currency issued by a UK bank because
nobody would trust a Russian or a Chinese bank per se.
Using those safe jurisdictions to issue this new currency,
Russia and China would then say, henceforth, any Russian
natural resource exports or any Chinese manufactured exports
could only be paid for in this new currency. If you wanted
some, you could trade and earn it or you could deposit your
gold and they would issue the currency and then you could use
this for transactions with them.
Obviously, this was a stretch. This is not anything that was
going to happen tomorrow. But at that time, we were actu-
ally ridiculed. We had uniformed military and intelligence ex-