The Wisdom Tradition | a philosophy podcast · Alexander Sachon

Interview | The Missing Trillions with economist DR. MARK SKIDMORE

January 10, 2026·1 hr·4 clips

Skidmore says the Army reported $1.2 trillion it could not account for in a single year.

The conversation begins on professional ground. The host introduces Dr. Mark Skidmore as a professor of economics at Michigan State University and asks how his work prepared him to study the missing trillions. Skidmore turns the question back first. He asks about the host's background and recent book, which brings in The Coming World Nation and its section citing Skidmore and Katherine Austin-Fitz. The framing is bigger than a budget dispute. It treats unexplained transactions as evidence of an institutional setup where public reporting can sit beside tools for concealment. Standard 56 becomes the hinge. Skidmore describes it as an administrative decree, not a congressional change, and says it gives officials authority to modify financial statements under national-security cover. That distinction carries the episode. To him, this is not a bookkeeping error. It is a break in the public accounting structure the Constitution is supposed to require. The report can still be there on paper. The problem, as the interview frames it, is that a visible financial statement stops meaning much if hidden changes are already allowed behind it. Scale adds the second pressure point. When the host asks how anyone should picture trillions of dollars, Skidmore compares the figure with India's 2023 GDP of about 2.1 trillion. The point lands because it is concrete. A country feeding, clothing, housing, and building infrastructure for roughly a billion people becomes the comparison for money that otherwise sounds unreal. The evidence is still incomplete. Skidmore says the available reports are only a smattering, spread across branches and years, with flows that do not add up to a full ledger. By the end, the conversation opens wider. Missing money leads into another pandemic, the WHO, and the idea that crisis response may have tested global decision infrastructure.

As heard by us

An accounting mystery becomes a study of power, scale, and public concealment.

The episode treats Mark Skidmore's discussion of the missing-trillions question as a problem of accounting and governance, not just a headline mystery.

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Why you'd press play

You want the missing-trillions story tied to power, accounting, and scale.

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