Yesterday, you'll recall, I pointed out the inconvenient resemblance of the New York Post's picture of a one hundred million dollar Federal Reserve bearer bond, and that associated with the Filipino Bearer Bond Scandal, and the inconvenient questions it raised (and let's be honest here... you all thought of these questions too):

Were the soggified hurricanized $70,000,000,000 bearer bonds on Wall Street any portion of the bonds from the Japanese, Spanish, Italian, or Filipino Bearer Bonds scandals? If so, how the heck did they get into the vault of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation which is, according to the New York Post article, "working feverishly to restore the paper?" Guys, what's so special about this paper? Why not just print off replacement bonds? (Ok...dumb question, I know....oh wait, I forgot, all those bonds from the bearer bonds scandals are fake, part of that world wide traffic of counterfeit bearer bonds in denominations so astronomical no one can afford them... and besides, I also forgot, we're reassured by out always truthful government that they're counterfeit, and no such things ever existed, and they'd never lie, right?) Who are these bonds for? Oh yea, wait, I forgot, the whole point of bearer bonds is to protect the anonymity of their purchasers... but who has a cool $100,000,000 lying around to purchase one of these? Why did the New York Post put a picture of a Federal Reserve bearer bond in its article? Isn't the U.S. Treasury supposed to issue these things? Is the Federal Reserve doing so too? And if so, for how long? Is this why they don't want an audit? Is someone trying to tell us, by putting this picture in the article, that the soggified bonds are connected to the other bearer bonds scandals? (my bet: you betcha they are).

Ok... moving right along, then we're told courtesy of RT (Russia Today) and a few other outlets, that the "shadow banking" scandal has now grown to a mere $67,000,000,000,000... chump change, once again, compared to the quadrillions in derivatives and other "securities" floating around out there:

Shadow banking doubled during crisis to record 67 trillion dollars

Lets see now, what do we have?

Well, at the highest level of bankster insanity, we have those quadrillions of dollars' worth of toxic derivatives (aw, c'mon guys... you're thinking small, why not quintillions? Sextillions? Heptillions? You guys are pikers!). Then at a lower level of insanity, we have trillions in shadow banking, quantitative easing, and so on. Now, as the RT article rightly points out, this is an area where institutions that engage in practices "resembling" banking, but which are not banks, can do so without regulatory oversight... a pretty handy thing to have around as a kind of interface between a totally hidden system of finance, and the public world of finance.

Then, at the lowest level, we have all that gold in the world - how much is it? anyone got an accurate figure? - which some banks are trying real hard to reassure some governments it's not really necessary to assay or audit (think Germany here).

Three levels, and growing orders of magnitude at each level... Hmmm..... looks an awful lot to me like there's not only been rehypothecation of a whole lot of gold but, as Catherine Austin Fitts and many others have pointed out, rehypothecation of all sorts of assets...

Now, what could one do with all that money? Well... I can think of three things: (1) a slush fund for covert operations; (2) an endowment for a leveraged buyout of the world and institution of a global you-kn0w-what... but even that wouldn't account for all of it.... the third thing I leave to your imagination...

See you on the flip side...