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Thursday, June 18, 2009

Did you hear about the two Japanese guys

arrested by Italian police at the Swiss border trying to smuggle $134 billon dollars in US Treasury bonds into Switzerland in a false bottom suitcase? It hasn't been a big news item. Why not? Here's a link to the original story in Asia News, but there has not been a lot of coverage in the week since the original report.
If these bonds were in a denomination of $1000 there would have been 135 million of them. That would have been some humongous suitcase. But no, these bonds were in denominations of $500 million and even a billion dollars each. Since darned few investors have a billion dollars to invest at any given moment, these bonds were presumably printed to faciltate transactions between governments or central banks.
Italian authorities says they're investigating to determine whether the bonds are counterfeit. There have been rumors of the North Korean government investing in high tech counterfeiting enterprises. Maybe, but I don't think so. I mean if you were in a position to buy a billion dollar bond, you're probably smart enough to validate their authenticity. Of course, sometimes counterfeit bonds have been used to post as collateral for a big loan, and maybe scrutiny was less strenuous than in the event of a sale. But at this kind of value I doubt procedures would be lax.
So the fun part of the story is the the speculation about whose bonds they are. First guess would be the Japanese (or some other Asian government) treasury trying to to dump dollars in Switzerland through channels that would be untraceable. If there was more coverage of the story, maybe clever conspiracy theorists could come up with scenarios even more intriguing. The government dumping theory, though, is interesting enough in its implications.

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