Yesterday I began this short mini-series of articles and blogs dealing with the most recent counterfeit bonds scandal that has occurred, this time in connection with the Vatican Bank, or the Institute for Religious Works. As I noted yesterday, there are three (and really, when you count them carefully, four) parallels between this most recent affair, and that of the Japanese Bearer Bond scandal of 2009. The three(or four) parallels are:

Both scandals involved the apprehension and detention of two mean, carrying enormous amounts of money in allegedly counterfeit securities, in a briefcase, and finally, in both cases, in 2009 and again now, both men's names were withheld from the public, and the men were released.

Which leads us to today's...

IV... CONTEXTS, INCONGRUITIES, AND HIGH OCTANE SPECULATIONS

The context of all of this occurs in the midst of troubles surrounding the Vatican Bank, and Pope Francis I's apparent efforts to clean house and make public the banks' accounting. As I have noted previously on this site, an external auditor was hired for this purpose, an auditor which in turn is also the external auditor of record for major financial institutions such as Lloyd's of London and the Bank of International Settlements. So it is possible that perhaps this whole affair was conceived and contrived as some sort of test of the Vatican' Bank's new image of "accountability."

I would, however, venture the opinion that since the Vatican itself entered the fray surrounding the Japanese Bearer Bond scandal of 2009 via the East Asia News Service, and quickly announced that the securities involved in that affair were so good as to be indistinguishable from the real thing, that something else is probably going on here, and that the two events may be connected in some deep fashion. The fact that we have not yet been shown any pictures of the alleged counterfeit corporate securities in this most recent affair is telling, since in the cases of all three Bearer Bonds Scandals - the Japanese, Spanish, and Italian scandals - we were shown such securities.

There is a significant incongruity in this story, and I imagine most readers caught it, for it is an incongruity that is huge, given the extraordinary sums involved (in the trillions of euros or dollars). This huge incongruity lies simply in the assertion that the two men's hotel was searched, and the seals and stamps used to create the alleged counterfeits were discovered. This raises a question: if one were to attempt to counterfeit trillions of dollars' worth of corporate bonds in an attempt to open a (fraudulent) line of credit at the Vatican bank, would one be so careless as to leaves the implements by which one confected the counterfeit instruments in one's hotel room? The question is analogous to the problem of the $500,000,000 and $1,000,000,000 denominated bearer bonds involved in the Bearer Bonds Scandals, which, so the claim goes, were never issued by the US Treasury. Again, the question becomes: why bother to counterfeit something that in effect amounts to a $7 bill? something that never existed? (Of course, readers of my book Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations will recall that the alleged bearer bonds were not issued by the US treasury, but allegedly by the Federal Reserve directly and secretly, thus, US government denials may in fact be only a partial truth designed to mask something else, since the Federal Reserve is not a US Government agency). Here again, to attempt to defraud the Vatican Bank with counterfeit securities would inevitably entail that any counterfeits would have to be of extremely high quality in order to fool it, given that bank's experience with international clearing and securities in general. This in turn implies an operation more extensive than just two individuals, and thus perhaps they were released in order to see where they might lead.

The implication, in other words, is that high quality "counterfeits" may be really a case of "the unauthorized minting of exact and indetectable copies," requiring great expertise, access to the genuine articles, in a kind of modern, updated version of the Nazi counterfeiting scheme, Operation Bernhard. This implies in its turn the involvement of sophisticated players... international criminal organizations, or, perhaps, intelligence agencies. In either case, we are perhaps once again looking at yet another manifestation of a hidden system of (fraudulent) finance, or at attempts of those in the know, to expose it and its major players.

See you on the flip side.