Mountain Greenery

My attention was diverted last week by the story of two "Japanese" who were arrested on the Swiss-Italian border with a false-bottomed suitcase containing (as it was said) $134 million billion (#$@!) in US Treasury bills.

Now Joel calls my attention to a couple of qualifiers: One, they weren't Treasury Bills. And two, the carriers may not be Japanese (the clue was that they looked like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor).

I suppose an alert law student would have seen through this one from the get-go: the US doesn't deal in paper securities like this, any more than the Spanish government deals in gold doubloons. Oh, and did I mention that the "culprits," if you can call them that, now seem to have been released--to the tender mercies, perhaps, of the prospective buyers on whom they intended to inflict all this junk.

I smell a Donna Leon novel in the works here. And my, it is much more fun than trying to make sense out of the Obama bank-regulatory scheme.