(DTCC) BEARER BONDS UNCOVERED AND SOAKED BY HURRICANE SANDY

Bearer bonds are paper certificates, usually issued by governments, that are redeemable after a prescribed term. The bearer submits an attached coupon to receive payment. Because they are typically unregistered and can be used like cash, they were commonly used by those wishing to hide, and not pay taxes on, assets. They were banned in 1982. 

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/sunken_treasure_R1WidDOAwSBvWbYgSIoflJ 

One source said $70 billion in bearer bonds were in jeopardy.

Bloomberg

LIQUID ASSETS: Thousands of bearer bonds — which could be worth as much as $70 billion — are now in danger of turning to pulp after Hurricane Sandy flooded the downtown vault that had been storing them.

DTCC — a depository controlled by the biggest financial firms on Wall Street — won’t say exactly what was in its vaults, how much the notes are worth, and who owns what.
Most of its member firms, including Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS and Citi did not return calls.
The exception was Goldman Sachs, whose spokesman Michael DuVally confirmed Friday to The Post that his firm stored bearer bonds in the DTCC vaults. He acknowledged they would be nearly impossible to redeem if destroyed.
Yesterday morning, DuVally elaborated, and said the value of the Goldman bonds was “less than $1 million.” An hour later, he called back to say, “The market value of bearer bonds potentially impacted is less than $10,000.”
DTCC spokeswoman Judy Inosanto would say only that “a variety of equities and bonds” were damaged. “I can’t go into details. We do not provide values for security