www.adnkronos.com/IGN/News/Cronaca/

the question is. . .are they real? they may very well be forgeries. . .some more stories. .

www.dailykos.com/storyonly...witzerland

www.bloomberg.com/apps/news

www.japantoday.com/category...-in-italy

www.spiegel.de/internatio...158,00.html

www.examiner.com/x-2888-Wo...d-in-Italy

or intentionally undermining the confidence in US backed Treasuries. Made ya think and it makes money stop that hesitation any hesitation will do it.

.
The Japanese arrested in Italy with $134 billion were part of a CIA black-ops
June 15, 2009 - Benjamin Fulford

The Japanese citizens arrested in Italy last week carrying bonds worth $134 billion
www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1241.htm

were part of a CIA black-ops linked to the Nazi faction, according to high level intelligence sources.

The CIA front behind this operation is known as Mayflower
and is linked to a malevolent Chinese faction that wishes to restore dynastic rule in China.

One of the Japanese arrested was probably a Mr. Fukushima,
who works for the puppet emperor of Japan and the CIA and the Rothschilds.

The operation is also linked to former Japanese Prime Minister and Bush slave Junichiro Koizumi
as well as the current CIA-bribed traitor Prime Minister Taro Aso.

They were hoping to use the money in part to operate a massive psy-ops in Japan
designed to keep the current slave government in charge after elections that must be held by September 11th of this year.

For the sake of humanity and the planet, they must not be allowed to redeem those bonds.

We can also add that as a direct result of these arrests t
hat faction has contacted us and proposed talks in Switzerland. We will accept.


22 comments to read here:
benjaminfulford.typepad.com/benj....html

.
. .

.
Andrew - << This is all the same story. >>

tell me, and for once, dont avoid to reply to things of importance please -

in what way is 'THE U.S. MEDIA DOESNT REPORT THIS'

the same as 'THIS IS A CIA BLACK-OP'.......??


It seems as if you want to 'brush away' what I post, esp if it is IMPORTANT.

.
. .

.
VIDEO: Fake Treasury Bonds Seize - Bloomberg
www.youtube.com/watch

"Two Japanese travelers were stopped while trying to cross a Italy into Switzerland.
Authorities say they find treasury bonds with face value of $134 billion.
Treasury bonds are issued electronically nowadays."

(Bloomberg News)

.
. .

.
This came out only 20 min ago...
If one reads between the line - they still dont know if they are fake or not...

.

ITAILAN MAFIA CASHES IN ON FAKE T-BILLS
By FT reporters

Published: June 19 2009 03:00 | Last updated: June 19 2009 03:00
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f200...4feabdc0.html

One summer afternoon, two "Japanese" men in their 50s on a slow train from Italy to Switzerland said they had nothing to declare at the frontier point of Chiasso. But in a false bottom of one of their suitcases, Italian customs officers and ministry of finance police discovered a staggering $134bn in US Treasury bills.

Whether the men are really Japanese, as their passports declare, is not entirely clear, but Italian and US secret services working together soon concluded that the bills and accompanying bank documents were most probably counterfeit, the latest han-diwork of the Italian Mafia.

Few details have been revealed beyond a June 4 statement by the Italian finance police announcing the seizure of 249 US Treasury bills, each of $500m, and 10 "Kennedy" bonds, used as inter-government payments, of $1bn each. The men were apparently tailed by the Italian authorities.

Yesterday the mystery deepened as an Italian blog quoted Colonel Rodolfo Mecarelli of the Como provincial finance police as saying the two men had been released. The colonel and police headquarters in Rome both declined to respond to questions from the Financial Times.

"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.''

The Treasury has not issued physical Treasury bonds since the 1980s - they are handled electronically - though they still issue savings bonds in paper format.

In Washington a US Secret Service official said the agency, which is working with the Italian authorities, believed the bonds were fake.

Officials in Tokyo were nonplussed. Takeshi Akamatsu, a Japanese foreign ministry press secretary, said Italian authorities had confirmed that two men carrying Japanese passports had been questioned in the bond case, but that Tokyo had not been informed of their names or current whereabouts.

"We don't know where they are now," Mr Akamatsu said.

Italian officials, while pointing out that hauls of counterfeit money and Treasury bills were not unusual, were stunned by the amount involved. Investigators are looking into the origin and destination of the fakes.

Last month Italian prosecutors revealed they had cracked a $1bn bond scam run by the Sicilian Mafia, with the alleged aid of corrupt officials in Venezuela's central bank. Twenty people were arrested in four countries.

The fake bonds were to have been used as collateral to open credit lines with banks, Reuters news agency reported. The Venezuelan central bank denied the accusations.By FT staff in Rome, Tokyo, New York and Washington

Fall in jobless claims raises hopes

The number of US citizens claiming unemployment benefits fell for the first time since January, the labour department said yesterday, raising hopes the worst could be over for the stricken job market.

Continuing jobless claims declined by 148,000 to 6.69m in the first week of June, more than economists expected and marking the biggest weekly drop since 2001. The total number of US workers claiming unemployment benefits had hit new record highs for 19 straight weeks.

However, new jobless claims ticked up last week, offering a reminder that any employment recovery will be slow and that companies are continuing to cull workers as they cope with the recession. Initial jobless claims rose by 3,000 last week to 608,000 as layoffs mounted in the construction and car industries.

Joshua Shapiro, chief US economist at MFR, noted the probability that "long-term unemployed are starting to fall off the rolls as the duration of their unemployment benefits reaches the statutory limit".


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009



.
. .

.
Hal Turner and the $134 B US Treasury Bonds/Notes?

----- Original Message -----
From: Dimce Giorgief
To:
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 1:04 PM
Subject: Hal Turner and the $134B US Treasury Bonds/Notes?

June 19, 2009

Dear Mr. Turner:


turnerradionetwork.com/index.php


(( PS - JUST CHECKED THAT LINK - "ITS DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE" - AND NOT ALLOWED TO VIEW THIS RECOURSE" - Sunnely ))


Many people around the world are following the story of the mysterious $134B US Treasury Bonds/Notes? Myself included. It is also very interesting that you state and I quote, “it is now confirmed based upon the serial numbers of the Bonds, that the $134 Billion is part of the $686 billion of U.S. debt officially held by Japan.”


That is a very powerful statement and you must realize that it is detrimental to the United States of America, if indeed this is the case? Can you provide any evidence to back up this claim or is it an under cover source? This story is mysterious and the MSM seems to ignore it completely. In addition, the alternative news media have reported this story and with a few exceptions nobody knows if the treasuries are real. The few exceptions that claim they are real, also claim they are Federal Reserve US Debt Obligation Certificates dated 1933 / 34.


It would be a great justice to humanity, if evidence was provided and that these ‘instruments’ were shown to the world?


Best Regards, DG
P.S. I am sending this letter to a few of my friends.

.
. .

.
This is posted 7 hours ago in the prominent UK newspaper TELEGRAPH

IS THIS THE DEATH OF THE DOLLAR?
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...llar.html

After two smugglers were stopped last week with what at first appeared to be $134bn in US state bonds,
the tension and paranoia surrounding the fate of the dollar hit a new high.

By Edmund Conway
Published: 7:32PM BST 20 Jun 2009

Border guards in Chiasso see plenty of smugglers and plenty of false-bottomed suitcases,
but no one in the town, which straddles the Italian-Swiss frontier, had ever seen anything like this.

Trussed up in front of the police in the train station were two Japanese men,
and beside them a suitcase with a booty unlike any other.
Concealed at the bottom of the bag were some rather incredible sheets of paper.
The documents were apparently dollar-denominated US government bonds with a face value of a staggering $134bn (£81bn).

How on earth did these two men, who at first refused to identify themselves, come to be there,
trying to ride the train into Switzerland carrying bonds worth more than the gross domestic product of Singapore?

If the bonds were genuine, the pair would have been America's fourth-biggest creditor,
ahead of the UK and just behind Russia.

No sooner had the story leaked out from the Italian lakes region last week than it sparked a panoply of conspiracy tales.
But one resounded more than any other: that the men were agents of the Japanese finance ministry,
in the country for the G8 meeting, making a surreptitious journey into Switzerland
to sell off one small chunk of the massive mountain of US bonds stacked up in the Japanese Treasury vaults.


In the event, late last week American officials confirmed that the notes were forgeries.
The men, it appeared, were nothing more than ambitious scamsters. But many remain unconvinced.

And whether fake or otherwise, the story underlines one important point about the world economy at the moment:
that the tension and paranoia surrounding the fate of the US dollar has hit a new high.

It went to the heart of the big question: will the central bankers in Japan, China and elsewhere
continue to support the greenback even in the wake of the worst financial crisis in modern history,
or will they abandon it as America's economic hegemony dissipates?



Dollar obituaries are nothing new.
The currency has been presumed dead more times than Shane Macgowan.

But like the lead singer of The Pogues, the greenback has somehow withstood repeated knocks and scrapes
over the years and lived on, battered, bruised and a couple of teeth the lighter, to fight another day.

In the 1970s and 1980s there were plenty predicting its demise,
although at that point the main challenger was the Japanese yen.

And in the years preceding this crisis, economists and investors including Peter Schiff and George Soros
were lining up to declare the dollar's demise as the world's reserve currency.
In the late 1990s, the creation of the euro gave dollar sceptics another stick to beat the currency with,
and no doubt the European currency has claimed some of the prominence in its first decade.



Now, following the collapse of the global financial system, those warnings have become louder still,
and ever more difficult to dismiss – because this time around there are threatening noises
coming from those who actually have the power to do something about it.


First came a paper from Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China (PBoC),
a couple of months ago, positing the idea of introducing the special drawing right (SDR)
– a kind of internal currency at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – as an international reserve currency.

These calls were then repeated, with more force, by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev,
who last week declared that the world needed new reserve currencies in addition to the dollar.


And this time around, the dollar is most certainly suffering.

Since 2002 its trade-weighted strength – calculated against a basket of other currencies
– has fallen by more than a quarter, from 112 to 81 points.

In the same period, the proportion of dollars held by reserve managers in leading central banks
has also taken a dive. According to figures from the IMF, confirmed holdings of dollars in government vaults,
from Beijing and Tokyo to London and Paris, fell from 71pc of reserves to 64.5pc between 2002 and 2008.


However, detecting what is really happening in the world of foreign exchange reserves
is notoriously closer to an art than a science. For instance, figures from April seemed to suggest
a fall in China's holdings of US Treasuries – something 'dollapocalypticists' pounced on at the time.

But according to Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations,
the country was merely rejigging its Treasury portfolio rather than liquidating parts of it.

In such an opaque world
it is little wonder the conspiracy theories over those two Japanese smugglers show little sign of dissipating.


Nonetheless, for US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner,
who has inherited his predecessors' role as dollar wallah-in-chief,
the currency's travails have made it all the more difficult for him to repeat the mantra
that he "believes in a strong dollar" while keeping a straight face.

Indeed, when he tried to insist at a university lecture in Beijing earlier this month that
"Chinese financial assets are very safe," it drew floods of laughter from the audience.

He wasn't playing for laughs, but the irony of the situation is plain to see.
If there were a textbook list of actions one could take to weaken a currency,
the US (alongside most other developed nations) would be following it to the letter.

It has cut interest rates to a whisker above zero; it has engaged in quantitative easing,
pumping cash directly into the economy; it has committed to spending trillions of dollars
on a fiscal stimulus package designed to pull the country out of recession;
it has pledged tacitly to support its stricken banks so that no major institution is allowed to collapse.

In any normal circumstances, actions like these would hammer a currency.



According to Stephen Jen of BlueGold Capital Management:
"People are having second thoughts not simply because they don't like the dollar,
but they are having second thoughts about whether US assets are obviously the strongest assets to own."


Like everything else, the currency's fate depends on how well the US authorities manage the crisis.
The US is balanced on a knife-edge between possible Japan-style deflation
as the weight of all its debts bear down on it and potential inflation
as the force of all its powerful stimulus measures take root.
No one knows for sure which way it will fall, but neither would be particularly good for the currency,
and by extension for those who hold much in the way of dollar assets.


And China and all other major central banks which have trillions of dollars in their vaults,
face something of a dilemma. Any fall in the greenback will cause the value of their investments to slide.

Even if they wanted to exit, there seems no easy way of doing so without provoking some serious self-harm.

Indeed, according to Olivier Accominotti, a PhD economist at Paris's Sciences Po university,
the situation is not unlike that faced by France in the 1920s, as it sought to reduce its massive sterling reserves.
The Bank of France found itself in a "sterling trap" in which it "could not continue selling pounds
without precipitating a sterling collapse and a huge exchange loss for itself".


Neil Mellor, of Bank of New York Mellon, said:
"We've got a situation where Geithner is smiling
and has no choice but to stress the credibility and stability of the US financial and economic system,
while the creditors [such as the Chinese] smile back and say they believe him,
while at the same time giving hand signals to their reserve managers to get rid of these things."


Rather like the brinksmanship on display throughout the Cold War,
it is a dilemma which applies itself to game theory. Both sides know that the dollar is set to weaken,
but both could be set to suffer if they both allowed it to collapse at the same time.

"If you are the Chinese it is in your interest to play the game – you've got a lot of dollars at stake
– but in the long run you surely want to reduce your holdings and diversify them at the margins," says Mellor.


Still, with every passing week,
the conjunction of different warning signals for the US currency seems to evolve and intensify.

Recently, the alarm bell ringing most loudly has been the increase in yields on US Treasuries
– a sign, some fear, of acute nervousness among institutional investors
about the sheer scale of the cash the Obama administration is planning to borrow in coming years.

The Federal Reserve's meeting next week is likely to be watched attentively by everyone with a stake in the game,
as the central bank indicates whether it is planning to plough more dollars of newly-created cash into the economy.

But while the debate fixates on the greenback, the issues at heart here go far deeper.

The dollar's fate is intertwined with that of the global economy.
America is on the brink of losing its economic superpower status,
which it will have to share with China at least, if not others, in the coming years.

Holding such a position confers important responsibilities,
none of which is more symbolic than providing the world's reserve currency
– the currency against which all major commodities are denominated,
and the de facto international unit of exchange in trade and finance.


It was a position enjoyed by UK sterling during the first waves of globalisation
in the Victorian era and the final decades of the British Empire.

Eventually, around the time of the Second World War, the dollar inherited the mantle.
At first this was something enshrined in the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944,
which fixed world currencies to the dollar, but although that system broke down in the 1960s and 1970s,
it has remained the de facto currency of choice.


In a globalised world,
with trade being carried out between hundreds of different nations by thousands of different companies,
having an international standard makes sense:
it enables traders to exchange goods more quickly and efficiently than they would have done otherwise.

It may be invisible to us, but the vast majority of foreign exchange transactions
– particularly those between smaller nations – involve the dollar.

Exchange your sterling for Thai baht and you're actually swapping pounds for dollars for baht,
whatever the exchange booth says. Even the much-vaunted exchange arrangements by the Brazilian
and Chinese are designed not to disrupt these foundations, but merely to smooth things over for importers and exporters.



But a by-product of the dollar's dominance has been the skewing of the world's monetary system.
By dint of having this blessed position, the US has been able to finance ever-larger current account and fiscal deficits,
with both the government and the public borrowing from overseas, at cheap rates of interest.

It has been able to sell US Treasuries at interest rates that other countries can only dream of
because of this position as reserve currency. It has had a captive consumer
– both because its government bonds are something of a safe haven
and because those wishing to peg their currencies against the dollar
and enhance their trade flows have little choice but to buy US Treasuries.


And this mutated international monetary system
that has evolved since the 1960s is largely responsible for the crisis into which the world has tipped.
Because it was able to borrow off other countries at such low rates without enduring the market punishment
– in other words higher interest rates –
America was able to build up massive current account deficits which poured a record amount of debt
throughout its economy, which manifested itself in the financial crisis.


Indeed, as Mervyn King said in a speech earlier this year:

..........."At the heart of the crisis was the problem identified but not solved at Bretton Woods
– the need to impose symmetric obligations on countries that run persistent current account surpluses
and not just on countries that run deficits. From that failure stemmed a chain of events,
no one of which alone appeared to threaten stability,
but which taken together led to the worst financial crisis any of us can recall."



When the PBoC's Zhou referred to the SDRs he was not merely questioning the dollar's pre-eminence.

He was indicating something far more radical
– that China supports plans for a new Bretton Woods-style agreement to manage the flows of cash around the world.

At that seminal conference in 1944,
John Maynard Keynes's original idea, which was watered down by Harry Dexter White of the US Treasury,
was for an international reserve currency, Bancor, fixed against a basket of 30 currencies,
and that countries would be penalised if their current accounts swung too far into surplus or deficit.

It is an idea which is now being dusted off from history books by officials in finance ministries around the world,
including in China.


Such a radical shake-up would cause earthquakes in the currency markets,
a prospect which perhaps makes it unlikely.

So in the absence of such a deal, how is the dollar's role likely to evolve in the coming years?
The short answer is that no one should expect it to lose its reserve currency status any time soon.
It took around half a century for Britain to cede this position to the US,
even after being overtaken in true economic might.


One possibility is that the SDR may be used increasingly as a means of denominating assets in accounts,
but this is something which would take place gradually, over a course of some years.


But even if that is a bridge towards a multi-polar world,
in which other currencies vie with the dollar for influence, it will take some time
– perhaps 30 years or more, according to Stephen Jen. "People should look at history," he said,
referring to sterling's pre-eminence in the first part of the 20th century. "There's a real incumbency advantage."


Jim O'Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, sees the next few years as something of a "vacuum period".


"The BRIC countries [Brazil, Russia, India and China] are becoming so much more important,
while the G7, including the US declines, which raises issues about the degree of dominance of the dollar.
The problem is that the currencies of the BRICS are the ones that matter,
but they won't let you export or use their currencies.


"Until we see another five years' of evidence over whether China is a more consumer-driven economy,
becoming bigger and bigger, and whether the euro can have a successful second decade,
the dollar looks set to remain dominant."


China has made some hints about loosening its hold over the yuan in recent months,
but these are only early manoeuvres. A second step would be to allow the yuan to become a part of the SDR
– whose own value is determined by those of a basket of currencies including the dollar, pound and euro.
As Jen adds, there are certain prerequisites any contender to the crown of world reserve currency needs in its pocket.


"We have to ask this question:
is Russia going to provide asset market that will be as liquid, reliable property rights,
the rule of law, currency convertibility and so on?
Will we see the same from the likes of China? Their task is very daunting."


Referring to the forged Treasury bonds picked up on the Japanese smugglers on the Swiss border, he adds:

"There is a message here: we haven't heard much about anyone counterfeiting roubles.
That is probably telling you something."



.
. . I think its suitable to end this article with the themesong of 'Impossible Mission' ; )

www.youtube.com/watch

.
. .