The Fed’s FOMC announcement came out…

We got exactly what I expected, a kind of wishy-washy, “hedging our bets” statement from the Fed. You have to remember that Bernanke was Greenspan’s right hand man for much of the bubble days of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, so the guy is an expert at walking both sides of the line when it comes to policy and public statements.

For instance, the Fed announced it would keep interest rates between 0% and 0.25% for an “extended period.” No surprise there. As I’ve noted previously, 80%+ of the $200+ trillion in derivatives sitting on US commercial banks’ balance sheets are related to interest rates.

For the Fed to hint at raising rates (let alone raise them) would kick off a systemic implosion that would wipe out the very guys the Fed has been bailing out. Suffice to say the Fed won’t be raising interest rates …

In November of 1997, my partner and co-editor of  The Casey Report, Doug Casey, wrote an article titled “Foundations of Crisis,” which leaned heavily on the research of Neil Howe and the late William Strauss.  Howe and Strauss have written many books on how generations determine the course of history and how they will shape America’s future. Their forecasts on a wide variety of indicators have turned out to be amazingly accurate. They were among the first to predict (back in the late 1980s) the rise of Boomer-driven culture wars and the simultaneous rise of Gen-X-driven free agency and distrust of government. And they were completely alone back then in predicting, for the post-X “Millennial Generation” (a label they coined), a decline in youth crime and risk taking and an increase in youth civic engagement that would first become apparent around the year ...

Today’s Notes reads more like a John le Carre novel than an investment newsletter. But bear with us. It tracks one of the most fascinating news stories you’ve never heard of.  The news reports are maddeningly sketchy. And the mainstream media is doing a damn good job of not reporting the story.

But it’s clear the arrests by Italian authorities of two “Japanese-looking” men allegedly attempting to smuggle $134.5 billion worth of US bearer bonds across the Swiss border is the biggest financial crime in history. And one with major implications for America’s economic security.

For those of you who don’t know, a report surfaced on Monday, June 8, on an obscure Vatican-sponsored news website, AsiaNews.it, that Italy’s financial police (Guardia Italiana di Finanza) had “seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland.”

According to the report, these

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