By Manuela Saragosa
Business reporter, BBC World Service
The bond certificates in question
What do you get when you mix two Japanese nationals with some fake US government bonds, a slow train to Switzerland and members of the Italian financial guard?
The answer is a $134bn (£82bn; 97bn euros) conspiracy theory which has fired up a whole realm of financial bloggers on the internet.
But then this is a story which does have the ring of a John Le Carre novel.
It begins with two 50-year-old Japanese men being stopped by Italy’s Guardia di Finanza – the country’s financial guard – on a train passing through Chiasso, a small border town between Italy and Switzerland.
The Italian finance guards ask the pair if they have anything to declare on their way into Switzerland. Both insist they haven’t.
But on a hunch, the guards decide to search their suitcase anyway.
In it, under items of personal clothing, they find a concealed area stuffed with documents that look like dollar-denominated US government bonds apparently worth a jaw-dropping $134bn.
That is enough to fund three Beijing Olympics, with some change leftover to boot.
Secret mission?
It clearly is a remarkable tale, but after the “bonds” were seized by the Italian finance police, the men, after some questioning, were let go, sparking a frenzy of conspiracy theories on the internet.
Now questions abound: are the bonds real or counterfeit? And why were the Japanese men not arrested?
Were they, perhaps, actually Japanese government officials on a secret mission to dump US dollar-denominated assets?
And if so, is that just more evidence that a growing number of investors are losing faith in the US economy and the US government’s ability to repay is ballooning debt?
Who else is involved, ask the bloggers. Is this the work of the Italian mafia? Take a trip round the web, and there is no shortage of explanations.
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