So, two Japanese nationals got caught with $134 billion in US Treasury bonds, and nobody knows if they’re real or not. Imagine, for a second, that you own the bonds, and they’re real.

• If you sell them at face value, that’s a massive bet on your own honesty.
• If you try to sell them at less than face value, you’re admitting you could be a crook. Who wants to bet billions of dollars on an admitted potential criminal?
• You could try to prove that they’re real, but you might end up spending millions of dollars — and you might spend that money only to find out that they’re fake.
• You could just wait for them to mature, and see if anybody else cashes in bonds with the same serial numbers. But then you’re acting like they’re really worth $134 billion, so anyone willing to risk anything less than that to get them is getting a good deal. Suddenly, your job is as hard as the secret services’, but your budget is zero.

So what would you do? Going to some remote mountain pass and trying to ditch those bonds as fast as possible sounds pretty good to me.