Yea, that caught my eye too.
To be fair, the Fed was rumored last December to be considering selling their own bonds. But the idea brought forward so much controversy that the Fed appeared to drop it.
Here’s a few ways to interpret that, in order of decreasing probability and increasing hilarity:
1. The reporter and editor are so clueless as to let such an obvious mistake make it to publication.
2. The report is accurate because the counterfeiters were so dumb they wrote the wrong thing on the papers.
3. The Federal Reserve covertly worked with Asian governments to secretly issue Fed-Bonds to bypass Congressional authorization and bungled the thing Inspector Cluseau style.
Actually, the whole mix of events - from massive numbers of bearer bonds to the unprofessional manner of movement to the apparently Japanese nationals - sounds more like a North Korean counterfeiting operation than anything else. If so, I hope the other deliveries that we didn’t catch are obvious forgeries.