Before he was overthrown and killed, Col Ghadafi of Libya kept something like $12 billion in currency in his bank.Apparently, Ghadafi is smart enough to realize that as soon as he ceased being a head of state his deposits in foreign banks would be frozen so that cold hard cash would be the only way he could be sure that he could leave Libya with money. Â
But this was not Ghadafi’s only miscalculation. Cash is not only cold and hard, but also heavy. One US bill weighs about one gram, so an ounce of $100s would be $2800. A pound of money would total about $40,000 a goodly sum for you or me, but not one that would keep the Colonel and his cadre for very long. A hundred pounds of money would be $40 million, riches for most of us, but still small change for a dictator. No, if Ghadafi wanted to cut and run with as much as possible in paper assets in a suitcase he had better start collecting stamps.Â
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He should buy 10c 1847s (Scott #2) of the United States, negotiable anywhere in the world. With 20 stamps to the gram (worth $10,000) an ounce of # 2s would be worth at a bit more than $1/4 million and a pound at close to $4 million. He could take a fifty pound suitcase of US # 2s on any international flight, carrying $200 million without even incurring any overweight luggage charges. But dictators aren’t usually philatelically astute and Ghadafi probably wasn’t even a collector at all. But getting a hernia lugging the cash he had stolen out of Libya turned out to be the least of the things he had to worry about.