US government securities worth US 134.5 billion seized from Japanese nationals

Degenerate

bubblesmoney wrote: »

cant cut paste that graph as MSEforums doesnt allow to attach extracts from word documents. but after looking at that graph it looks like well above 100,000 of these bearer bonds have been issued each of 500million dollars over the years and more of other denominations.

The graph is scaled in millions of dollars, not numbers of notes. When it shows it peaking around 15,000 that's $15 billion in $500m notes, ie 30 notes. The way you're reading it it would add up to $7.5Tn in $500m notes, which is almost 4x the US national debt at that time.

bubblesmoney

http://www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=15588&size=A

So far the only official statement made by any government authority is that by the Italian financial police, on 4 June, right after the money was seized. The only new piece to this big puzzle is information from Japanese agencies which cite Japanese consular sources.
According to them, the two Asian men stopped at Ponte Chiasso (Italy) on their way to Chiasso (Switzerland) were indeed Japanese nationals, one from Kanagawa Prefecture (central Japan) and the other from Fukuoka Prefecture (western Japan).
The only other certainty is that both men were released after their identity was established.
If police had enough elements to conclude that the securities were fakes (and this is true even for lower denominations or net worth), it had to arrest the two men. Failure to do so would have meant charges for the police officers involved.
If this was not the case, then the two men were released because police authorities were convinced that the securities were real. In fact under Italian law, the authorities could not arrest the two Japanese nationals but could only impose a fine worth 40 per cent of the value of anything above 10,000 €.
If this did not happen, there is only one other possible explanation, namely that an order from higher up the chain of command in the government came on national interest grounds.
Neither the Guardia di Finanze nor any other Italian government agency has released an official comment or statement on the matter one way or the other. It is not even known if a written fine was issued (had it been it would indicate that the securities were real for the police).
All that AsiaNews can conclude is as follow:
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Conversely, we do know that the US treasury did issue one billion dollar Kennedy Bonds less than ten years ago, like those mentioned in the police’s official statement of 4 June, but whether the latter are real or not is something that has not yet been officially determined.
So far little has been said about who the two Japanese men really are. Given what the securities are worth this is understandable, albeit unusual.
Two weeks after the story initially broke Bloomberg quoted a US Treasury official, Stephen Meyerhardt, who could claimed that the securities were “clearly fakes”. Yet in another interview Meyerhardt said that he had not seen the securities in person but had relied on a photo on the internet to reach his opinion.
Also, two weeks into the affair, after Italian and US authorities were informed about the seizure, no one from the US Treasury has yet to come to Italy to check out their authenticity; indeed such a simple operation if we are to believe Mr Meyerhardt since he could reach that conclusion just by looking at an internet photo and this against the backdrop of the Italian financial police which claims that if the securities were indeed counterfeit they were so well done that they were indistinguishable from real ones.
What this means is that either the Italian policemen are totally incompetent (which is not very likely) or that Meyerhardt’s statement should be taken with a pinch of salt.
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Whatever the case may be, the fact that two weeks into the affair US experts in counterfeit securities have not yet arrived in Italy raises more than one question; after all we are talking about US$ 135.4 billion.
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Confidential sources, whose reliability AsiaNews could not confirm, claim that one of the two Japanese stopped and then released in Ponte Chiasso was Tuneo Yamauchi, brother-in-la of Toshiro Muto, who was until recently Deputy Governor of the Bank of Japan, which of course does not automatically mean that the securities are real.
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What seems clear is that the Federal Reserve has a vested interest in helping the Bank of Japan get the Securities back to avoid paying the Italian fine. The Fed in fact is having a hard time trying to sell its bills on various markets and the Japanese are its main buyers.
At the same time the Berlusconi administration in Italy, despite its popularity and electoral successes, could come under pressure at home if the securities are actually real and it came out that it was unwilling to enforce its own laws on Italian territory.

bubblesmoney

Degenerate wrote: »

The graph is scaled in millions of dollars, not numbers of notes. When it shows it peaking around 15,000 that's $15 billion in $500m notes, ie 30 notes. The way you're reading it it would add up to $7.5Tn in $500m notes, which is almost 4x the US national debt at that time.

the graph has got a heading saying face value of v high denomination notes v/s number of notes. so the graph is scaled in numbers of v high denomination notes on the y axis v/s x axis as the year of issue. the face value of the notes is shown in different colours of lines and not the total amount as you suggest. atleast thats the way it looks to me looking at the way the graph is presented on the msword version which i downloaded.

but i agree that the total amount does seem high going by my calculations. :beer:

ruggedtoast

This thing seems to have a habit of not going away -

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=afX0BWHToC1g

U.S. Authorities Probing $100 Billion of Bonds Seized in Italy
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By Sonia Sirletti and Elisa Martinuzzi
Sept. 18 (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.
To contact the reporter on this story: Sonia Sirletti in Milan at [EMAIL="ssirletti@bloomberg.net"]ssirletti@bloomberg.net[/EMAIL]
Last Updated: September 18, 2009 07:02 EDT