Posted on 06/10/2009 10:45:08 PM PDT by Xenophon450
ROME —
Two Japanese nationals were detained by Italian financial police last week after trying to enter Switzerland with $134 billion worth of undeclared U.S. bonds, mostly Treasury bonds, an Italian daily said Wednesday. The Japanese consulate general in Milan confirmed that the detention had taken place and said it was trying to confirm with Italian authorities whether the two were indeed Japanese nationals and their identities.
According to the report in il Giornale, two unidentified Japanese in their 50s concealed the bonds, including 249 U.S. Treasury bonds each worth $500 million, in a suitcase with a false bottom that was searched by the Italian authorities June 3 when they were in Chiasso, at the border with Switzerland, about 50 kilometers north of Milan. The daily did not say on what charges they have been detained, but the two may have been detained on suspicion of attempting to take a large amount of securities out of Italy without declaring it because the paper said they had not declared the bonds.
$134 billion? WOW. As they say, a billion here and a billion there and soon we’re talking about real money. THAT is real money.
North Koreans?
Ummmm...That’s kinda a lot of money...
....a least it was before O’s Big G Giveaway Show.
This is an astounding amount of money. Very few people have this kind of liquidity. It should be fairly easy to figure out who owns the dough. I’ll bet the 2 Japanese (if they really are Japanese) are just the legs on this deal. Wow! Very strange.
Sounds like one of those big stories that will be ignored by our lame domestic media outlets in favor of something important like rampant sexting in schools.
Man O man O man we got anonymous, undistinguished folks running around with a hundred billion dollars in bonds, not representatives of the government or foreign banks or the IMF...
We are in serious, deep doo. Seriously deep.
Could this be some of the missing TARP money
What’s your theory?
Indeed, past 100 billion I can only see the holder being another nation. Why take such risk with 100+ billion? Why not just hire Blackwater or Brinks or some other group to transport it? The fee would be minuscule.
Just the denominations they mention works out to $124.5 billion. Looks correct.
They were trying to cash them out or do a forex transaction without catching any publicity.
Of course they could be counterfeit, but I kinda doubt that.
The dollar is collapsing as we speak.
Who’s gonna go the across border and declare that they’re carrying $34 billion on them??
I’ll bet this wasn’t the first time that they’ve done this...
Go pull out the Don Johnson episode from ten years ago in Bavaria. Similar type situation. Don got caught big-time with several billion in notes. There were alot of questions and I think he had to finger a number of big-names in California who were using him (and a number of entertainers) as transport vehicles back and forth to Switzerland.
Its amusing how this paper note business works. You merely swap property or items of value for the notes, and then hide them in vaults of countries way out of sight. You take bribes and settle disputes with “invisible money”.
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