Wondering how the USA is going to solve its not inconsiderable debt prolems? How do China and Japan solve the selling down the bonds without alerting the market and causing a currency collapse?
Alert minds on the net, (via itulip) spotted this interesting piece of news about a small cross border movement the other day.
Update: link above removed as it no longer worked, so I was beginning to doubt the story, but it has now reappeared on more reliable sources such as Bloomberg.
"Italy’s financial police (Guardia italiana di Finanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland. They include 249 US Federal Reserve bonds worth US$ 500 million each, plus ten Kennedy bonds and other US government securities worth a billion dollar each.
Italian authorities have not yet determined whether they are real or fake, but if they are real the attempt to take them into Switzerland would be the largest financial smuggling operation in history; if they are fake, the matter would be even more mind-boggling because the quality of the counterfeit work is such that the fake bonds are undistinguishable from the real ones."
1. Japan is trying to get out of the dollar, really.
2. Some private individual has has a really good day at the casino, and is trying to hide their earnings.
3. Someone in the Yakuza thinks that no-one in a Swiss bank will blink an eyelid at a few tens of billions of bearer bonds, and will take them without question.
If this story runs, we will find out something interesting one way or another. (Not to mention why no mainstream press interest.)
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