- No One Knows Truth About $300 Billion Bonds From Alleged ’34 Plane Crash (Bloomberg, Jan. 18, 2012):
Chris Estrella, a Filipino social worker, says he led a troop of five porters out of a Mindanao jungle in January 2000 with a weather-beaten iron and leather box crammed with $25 billion of U.S. government bearer bonds.
“The elders of the Umayamnon tribe told me an American plane crashed in their river in the 1930s,” Estrella, 47, says by mobile phone from a footpath between the tribal village and Davao, the largest city on the Philippine island. “The river dried up in the 1990s, and the natives went into the plane and found 12 boxes that contained $300 billion in bonds.”
Each box, emblazoned with the Great Seal of the United States and the words “Federal Reserved Bond,” held five gold coins struck with a portrait of George Washington on one side, Estrella says. They rested atop stacks of certificates purporting to have been issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in 1934 and redeemable in gold bullion. The notes bore the signature of then Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.
Such fixed-income instruments, also known as coupon bonds, belong to whoever holds them, rather than to a registered owner. Vouchers representing interest payments were attached to the 30- year bonds that were denominated in amounts of as much as $100 million. Estrella says he later brought three other similarly filled chests out of the jungle. Continue reading »
Tags: Bonds, Debt, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Government, Philippines, Politics, U.S.