Two Japanese detained in Italy with $139 *billion* in US Treasury bonds | Hacker News Reader

Two Japanese detained in Italy with $139 billion in US Treasury bonds

japantoday.com

16 pointsEliezer10 comments

This is a macroeconomically significant amount of money - en route to Switzerland, apparently. There was a discussion on Reddit which failed to debunk or explain: http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/8rnt5/very_strang...

I'm posting it here in the hope that someone can shed light on it.

Original story here, with photos of the bonds: http://new.ticinonews.ch/articolo.aspx?id=161782&rubrica...

What happens on reddit, stays on reddit.

Does upvoting something here after it has been [dead]'ed contribute to its potential resurrection? I think this is pretty interesting, even if it has already been posted on reddit.

Is that an actual rule? If the Bank of Japan is dumping dollar holdings (as one commenter suggested) then it's probably a good time to know it. The discussion on HN is often a bit more sophisticated - just because Reddit tries to solve something and fails doesn't mean it's time to give up on the wisdom of crowds.

The idea is to keep this crowd more or less narrowly focused. Economics/politics discussions tend to degrade quickly, and draw in a lot of people only marginally interested in the site's main focus. In other words, the set of people interested in Obama or the world economy can crowd out many times over the set of people interested in how Erlang is put together.

If nothing else, this should be interesting because transferring money is a way to transfer information: someone is making a very significant statement about the US. If the bonds are counterfeit, that statement is that the US is still a creditworthy country, whose debts are more trusted than anyone else's; if they're real, it's a statement that the US is not so trustworthy at all.

Of course, people make statements about this kind of thing all the time. Since few of them stake billions of dollars -- in cash or in reputation -- few of them could be considered as committed to the view.

Interesting? Certainly! Appropriate? In my opinion, no. That's the distinction I make... there's plenty of stuff that's fascinating, but probably shouldn't be here.

For instance, Cadel Evans managed to lose the lead at the Dauphine Libere to Valverde, who was down by something like two minutes, in today's race with a summit finish up Mt Ventoux. In comments after the race, Evans was talking about why no one else would pull, which seems to demonstrate some weakness on his part, perhaps more mental than physical. It seems vaguely reminiscent of Sastre riding away up a hill to take yellow at the Tour last year.

I find that very interesting, but it's certainly not appropriate for this site, and I don't think it would be even if I could get a group of like minded hacker-cyclists to vote it up.

And "sexting" is closer to this crowd's focus? shrug Who knew.

I was going to head to New Mogul anyway to see what comments there are about this story, but it's not nearly as populated as HN yet.

If Reddit had an article on the next Google or on Microsoft declaring bankrupcy, would it be off topic on Hacker News _because_ Reddit had an article on it?

Speculation from New Mogul: It's fake, possibly North Korean agents with Japanese ID. http://www.newmogul.com/item?id=11485

But, as said on Reddit, if these are fakes they are perfect copies of the originals and can only be disputed by finding the originals.

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