This is an underreported story that I’ll go ahead and attempt to scoop the mainstream media on: Two Japanese men in their 50s were detained by Italian authorities while crossing the border into Switzerland with US$134,000,000,000 in US Treasury Bonds hidden in the bottom of a suitcase.

Private-sector US Treasury Bond trades are done entirely electronically. It’s hard to believe, but central banks hold little pieces of paper worth a billion dollars each. Although the US claims that there aren’t enough such pieces of paper in the world for these to all be real.

This is stranger than fiction and of course there are all sorts of fun theories. If they’re all real, then no matter where they’re from, this is probably the end of the US$ as global reserve currency – which this blog keeps predicting over and over again.