About Those $134 Billion in U.S. Bonds

...found in a suitcase carried by two Japanese men headed from Italy into Switzerland. I am reasonably comfortable believing they are fake. I have little reason to no reason to dispute the Treasury comment on the matter:

“They are all fraudulent, it’s obvious. We don’t even have paper securities outstanding for that value,’’ said Mckayla Braden, senior adviser for public affairs at the Bureau of Public Debt at the US Treasury department. “This type of scam has been going on for years.’’

And, Bloomberg further reports:

Another U.S. official said the seized bonds were purported to be issued during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, but the certificates showed a picture of a space shuttle on it -- a spacecraft that first flew in 1981. Some of the bonds were purportedly issued in a $500 billion denomination that never existed.

The Treasury story falls into line with scams that have been brought to my attention in the past.

For years, various clients, at different times, have approached me to investigate supposed secret debt the U.S. has issued. The debt always supposedly pays an interest rate higher than current market rates, and there is always some conspiratorial explanation for why this debt was issued in the first place and why it is a secret to all but the ultimate insiders (The insiders seem to most often be identified as the Rothchilds).

In every case I have been asked to examine, the person telling the story, I would rank as probably one notch above Nigerian email scammers. Their stories are always impossible to follow or verify and any documents they show tend to also be suspicious.

I remember one such individual I met, in a practiced way,let slip out of his briefcase some sort of Swiss metro card. I guess to give the impression he had just been to Switzerland. Another once showed me a document that was purportedly an English translation of a newspaper story written in a Turkish newspaper. This person showed me both the Turkish newspaper and the translation. I actually believe 90% of the translation was accurate, but the key important fact that would verify the this person's story was in one single paragraph which was written in a style and voice different from the rest of the translation.

In short, there are some very tall tales out there that operate on some variation of a Ponzi scheme. Who knows how much money they have sucked in? Bernie Madoff proved that you can suck in a lot of money over a long period of time.

These bonds seem to be a part of that tradition.