HERE WE GO AGAIN: U.S. AUTHORITIES INVESTIGATE $100 BILLION BOND SEIZURE IN ITALY
September 19th, 2009This isn’t the incident from June. This is a new one.
Via: Bloomberg:
The U.S. Secret Service is examining more than $100 billion of U.S. government bonds confiscated in northern Italy in August, just two months after $134 billion of allegedly fake securities were seized in a nearby town.
The Secret Service is analyzing whether the bonds taken in August may be counterfeit, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Rome. Italy’s financial police in Varese, north of Milan, arrested two individuals carrying the securities in a briefcase, according to a person involved in the case.
The two men currently are in custody as prosecutors in the town of Busto Arsizio carry out their investigation, the person said. The seized notes include securities with face values of $500 million and $1 billion, Italian daily MF reported today, without saying where it got the information.
“There must be a well-organized group behind these alleged crimes,” Fabio Polimeni, a Milan lawyer specializing in counterfeiting cases, said.
Italian authorities seized U.S. treasuries on June 4 with a face value of more than $134 billion from two Japanese travelers attempting to cross into Switzerland. The two men later disappeared and the case is still under investigation. The U.S. government bonds found in the false bottom of a suitcase carried by the men were fake, a U.S. Treasury spokesman said June 18.
“As financial markets become more sophisticated, creative and bigger, we can expect criminal activity to go with it and it’s happening everywhere,” Livia Oglio, a Milan lawyer, said. “The amount seized is phenomenal.”
Since the beginning of the year the police at border stations in Italy have seized 1.7 million euros of genuine money and bonds, and have confiscated more than 100 million euros of bonds that have been determined to be false, according to an Italian finance police statement in July.
I would say this is less likely covert operations and much more likely the continuing fall of the legitimacy of the Italian and US nation-states coupled with the rise of financial guerilla “tribes” (the mafia in this case) enabled by globalism. See John Robb for more ideas on this topic. (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/)
D, I’d tend to agree with you. But I still haven’t a clue about the motive…I mean who’s buying/redeeming these bonds? Physical bearer-style bonds are about as illiquid as you can get, putting aside the whole claim that there really shouldn’t be any saleable ones left in the marketplace at all. When I read about the Japanese situation, I thought maybe they’d found a serious idiot, but now it’s beginning to look like there may be a more significant underground market for them…but I still don’t get why anyone would want this stuff? How do you actually sell/launder them when there’s no legitimate market?