BELGIUM RECLAIMS MANHATTAN

The Belgian Institute for World Affairs has revived its campaign to reclaim the most valuable chunk of real estate in the world - the island of Manhattan. This is very strategic at a time when Wall Street is in meltdown, because a group of Belgians say they owned Wall Street in the first place.

In 1626 Peter Minuit and five other Walloons bought Manhattan Island from the native inhabitants for the equivalent of $24. But the dollar had yet to be invented, so he used collectable objects and trinkets for currency. Then he ordered a new mud wall to be built to keep his cows in and the local indians out. The path alongside his wall became known as Wall Street and the colony was named Novum Belgium. It was another 20 years before Peter Stuyvesant took over for the Dutch in what they called New Amsterdam, and 40 years before the British gained control and named the place New York.

The Belgian Institute of World Affairs was set up in 1982 by two Belgian artists, Karel Schoetens and Jef Lambrecht, and their “original” Manhattan share certificates are currently on display at CollectValue.com, where they are valued at $24,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Perhaps they will consider swapping Manhattan back for some other collectable objects and trinkets on exhibition at CollectValue.com, which will soon allow users of its new social network to vote on the true value of anything and everything.

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