americanintokyo
Case closed.
obviously, there’s nothing to see here........... right...
This story just keeps getting better every day.
If they were counterfeit, that would be a crime, and they would not have been released.
Logical conclusion: They were the real deal, and the men were released no doubt with a little urging from the Japanese embassy there.
They went missing, eh? Just like our money, our future, our country. /pessimism
LOL
Mr Phelps, your mission - if you decide to accept it......
At first, I thought that the bonds were real, on the grounds that a fake $500 million bearer bond would be (I thought) impossible to unload. But I was corrected with a 2002 story (http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2002/10/07/daily40.html) showing that bonds in this denomination are forged.
So I now believe that they are fake. Which makes the release of the two men very mysterious, and causes me to think it was a Mafia operation.
I’ll point out that if this is a government operation, it is NOT an operation to quietly unload T-bills. Completely bypassing the issue that bearer bonds are not needed to quietly unload something, a government could have stuck them in a diplomatic “black bag”. If this is a government operation, the intent was for the men to get caught, possibly to make an anonmyous gift of several billion to the cash-strapped Italians.
Two reasons:
(1) They abet money laundering, because, unlike currency, just one piece of paper might have been worth millions of dollars.
(2) It was often very complicated to track sales and to tax interest payments.
In 2009, all US Treasury bearer bonds have matured, but apparently some have still not been redeemed.
The amount of unredeemed Treasury bearer bonds is not completely clear to me.
One financial website claims “less than $5 billion,” and Wikipedia claims “$100 billion.”
There's a web page at “Treasury Direct” that appears to state the amount is $100 million.
In any event, it seems likely that this huge amount of smuggled bearer bonds is counterfeit.
The scam usually works like this...
The con man offers to sell the bearer bonds for a fraction of their value because the “real owner” can't risk cashing them in because “he'll be arrested” or “assessed huge tax penalties” or some other nonsense.
When the buyers take the bonds to the US Treasury to cash them in, the Treasury just confiscates the fraudulent bonds and the buyer loses 100% of his investment.
All your bonds are belong to us!
Japan holds over 600 Billion in US bonds. ...And Italian cops aren’t too hard to bribe.
I’ll bet $10 both of those guys are dead by now.
