WTH?!??
nothing to see. move along...
Odd, this…
One summer afternoon, two “Japanese” men in their 50s on a slow train from Italy to Switzerland said they had nothing to declare at the frontier point of Chiasso.
But in a false bottom of one of their suitcases, Italian customs officers and ministry of finance police discovered a staggering $134bn (€97bn, £82bn) in US Treasury bills. [249 US Treasury bills, each of $500m, and 10 “Kennedy” bonds, used as intergovernment payments, of $1bn each]
That’s a significant percentage of all the bonds we have outstanding.
Whether the men are really Japanese, as their passports declare, is unclear
It’s rather a distinctive look—being Japanese. ...just sayin’
but Italian and US secret services working together soon concluded that the bills and accompanying bank documents were most probably counterfeit, the latest handiwork of the Italian Mafia.
rly?
The fake bonds were to have been used as collateral to open credit lines with banks…
“They are all fraudulent, it’s obvious. We don’t even have paper securities outstanding for that value,’’ said Mckayla Braden, senior adviser for public affairs at the Bureau of Public Debt at the US Treasury department. ...
The Treasury has not issued physical Treasury bonds since the 1980s – they are handled electronically – though they still issue savings bonds in paper format.
Isn’t this something a big international Swiss bank would know? Maybe I’m just naive, or compulsively retentive or something, but isn’t the location and ownership of every single $1bn ‘Kennedy’ bond known?
And if not, WTH is Treasury doing?!?
Officials in Tokyo were nonplussed. Takeshi Akamatsu, a Japanese foreign ministry press secretary, said Italian authorities had confirmed that two men carrying Japanese passports had been questioned in the bond case but Tokyo had not been informed of their names or whereabouts.
“We don’t know where they are now,” Mr Akamatsu said.
...Italian officials, while pointing out that hauls of counterfeit money and Treasury bills were not unusual, were stunned by the amount involved. Investigators are looking into the origin and destination of the fakes.
But ya didn’t hang on to the guys carrying the $134bn worth of paper? Interesting “decision.”
Remember—a large part of Treasury’s job is to maintain full faith and confidence in US financial instruments. That’s the danger in international counterfeiting; it devalues the Dollar [much as the wholesale printing of real dollars does. but that’s not important, now.]
Maybe I’m just demonstrating a dangerous naivete about ginormous international monetary instruments, but I do know, if I find a $20 tucked in a pocket of a pair of pants from the back of my closet I feel like I’ve not been paying enough attention. I shudder to think Treasury is being that kind of criminally sloppy.
Put me some Knowledge. Please.
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