Sometimes a bizarre event seems to capture the madness of the times, and this one from Bloomberg fits the bill. A couple of Asians carrying Japanese passports have been arrested by Italian police with a trunk load of non-negotiable US bearer bonds to the value of $134bn. The Fed did actually issue many bearer bonds to the value of $500m each until the late 1960's (when electronic record keeping superseded them), and these look on initial examination like the genuine article. If they are real, they could only have come from a handful of countries with sufficient dollar reserves to have accumulated such a huge sum, notably China and Japan. In the much more likely event they are fakes, it would be the biggest such operation in history, and would almost certainly imply state involvement, with North Korea the prime suspect. Either way, even in the context of the trillions we have become accustomed to seeing tossed around in bailout plans, we're talking serious money. The presentation of huge sums in US bearer bonds isn't unprecedented in fact, even if it is in scale. In 2008, two bearer bonds to the value of $1bn were presented in Singapore, and upon authentification the receipt from the Federal Reserve was signed by Ben Bernanke himself.