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Sunday, 21 June 2009 10:51 |
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The story of the two Japanese men trying to smuggle US bonds with a total worth of 134.5 billion dollars into Switzerland keeps raising questions. Despite lack of thorough media coverage, it is becoming clear that this is not something we can disregard. Here an overview of news snippets so you can make up your own mind.
 Reuters:A purported $134 billion in U.S. government bearer bond certificates seized by police near the Italian-Swiss border are fake, the U.S. Treasury said on Friday. "Based on the photograph we've seen online, they are clearly fake. And not even good fakes," said Stephen Meyerhardt, a spokesman for the Treasury's Bureau of the Public Debt.
The Infinite Unknown translated the German newspaper Die Welt: The smuggled bonds valued at 134 billion U.S. dollars are apparently authentic. [..] So let’s assume that the certificates are real, as German media seems to believe and which, by the way, makes logical sense given what they were and the sheer impossibility of cashing a fake $500 million bond.
Glenn Beck on Fox News: The Market Ticker: There are conflicting reports: Some that the two individuals were not arrested or charged. Detained briefly, but not charged, with some sources claiming that an Italian lawyer is involved and essentially sprung them (whether on their own recognizance or via bail is unreported, and if on bail, how it was posted.) Others, particularly a recent article out of the UK, simply says they were "arrested." I have seen nothing from a credible news stream stating that they are being held at the present time.
AsiaNews.it: [..] And some commentators are starting to link the story to reports in US press dating back to 30 March. On that date the US Treasury Department announced that it had about US$ 134.5 billion left in its financial-rescue fund, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), whose purpose is to purchase assets and equity to buttress companies in trouble. The existence of such means that the Obama administration may not have to go to Congress for additional funds, something which is especially important since many lawmakers have vowed to oppose any requests for more money.
SeekingAlpha: According to a brief Bloomberg article regarding this story, the seized bearer bonds allegedly were dated as of 1934. Since bearer bonds in denominations of $500 million did not exist in 1934, the bonds were deduced as fake, though the Italian police are still waiting for a declaration regarding the bonds’ authenticity from the SEC. There is something truly “off” about this declaration. How can the quality of the forged bearer bonds be so meticulous that they “are indistinguishable from the real ones”, yet the people involved in the alleged forgery so ill-informed as to not date the bearer bonds with a more recent year that would not immediately identify them as fraudulent? How hard would it have been to date the bearer bonds with a more recent year? An equivalent analogy would be if an expert art forger meticulously re-created a Picasso oil canvas and then erroneously signed the work with the wrong artist’s name. This story just does not add up.
[..] On March 30, 2009, the US Treasury Department announced that USD $134.5 billion remained in its Troubled Asset Relief Program [TARP]. The stated amount of seized bearer bonds was $134.5 billion. Coincidence?
Telegraph: How on earth did these two men, who at first refused to identify themselves, come to be there, trying to ride the train into Switzerland carrying bonds worth more than the gross domestic product of Singapore? If the bonds were genuine, the pair would have been America's fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the UK and just behind Russia. [..] The men, it appeared, were nothing more than ambitious scamsters. But many remain unconvinced. And whether fake or otherwise, the story underlines one important point about the world economy at the moment: that the tension and paranoia surrounding the fate of the US dollar has hit a new high. It went to the heart of the big question: will the central bankers in Japan, China and elsewhere continue to support the greenback even in the wake of the worst financial crisis in modern history, or will they abandon it as America's economic hegemony dissipates?
Max Keiser:
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Last Updated on Sunday, 21 June 2009 21:00 |
