≡ $134 Billion
My brother asked the question on Facebook. Why isn’t anyone talking about the $134 billion found in a suitcase?
I didn’t know anything about it, so I googled it and found that 5 days ago, two 50-something men were stopped by customs officers on a train in Italy on their way into Switzerland. The customs officers found $134 billion worth of undeclared US bonds in a false bottom of their suitcase(s). The men have been described as being Japanese, but that may not be true.
Bloomberg published an article about this on June 12th saying the Italians have asked the US to confirm the validity of the bonds…. “If the notes are genuine, the pair would be the U.S. government’s fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the U.K. with $128 billion of U.S. debt and just behind Russia, which is owed $138 billion. ”
According to Wikipedia, Japan is the second largest foreign creditor, holdiing 20.6% of U.S. Treasury Securities. China is #1.
I have found two YouTube videos on this. One is from FoxNews, where Glenn Beck says that if they’re fake, that would be bad, and if they’re real, it will be worse. He goes on to interview Joe Weistenthal, Editor of Clusterstock (http://www.businessinsider.com) – who points out that fake or real, some government is probably behind it. The second is from AsiaNews.It who shows what the bonds look like, and propose they are most likely fake.
If they are real, it looks like Italy will win BIG and could even wipe out its national debt by taking a big chunkola of the money as there’s some rule about declaring transferable funds in amounts greater than 10,000 Euros. On xe.com, at today’s rate, $134 billion converts to 96,830,389,024.68 EUR, so that’s way above that 10,000 Euro mark!!!
According to an article on Yahoo Canada, that fine would be $53 billion - (or $58 billion for you Canadian readers).
So why isn’t anyone talking about it? Maybe the numbers are too big and we can’t understand them. Maybe if the press starts talking about it, the market will collapse even more than they already have, and no country wants that. Maybe the story is too obscure: Italy, Switzerland, Japan - who cares???
60 Minutes this week showed that a guy named Harry Markopolos tried to get the SEC to investigate Bernie Madoff years ago, and he was ignored. Until the bubble broke.
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June 17th, 2009 at 7:59 am
If you look, one can find an array of stories about this event. I’m pretty sure that the powers that be would prefer we concern ourselves mostly with the circus and athletic contests: If there was an issue with near perfect forgeries of incredibly valuable documents, that would be bad, and I agree that if lone individuals happen upon transacting with the entire debts of nations then that too would be bad. There is, however, an angle to this story that is likely to be lost even to those hapless grassy knoll conspiracy folks: The folks who have unimaginable influence over entire economies see the value in public transit.
and they are stupid.
June 17th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
They are not stupid. They are SO TOTALLY clever. We are the stupid ones.
November 12th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Wow, very interesting story indeed! If they are real bonds, then won’t they be returned to their owner? Were these stolen or are the two men the owners?