China is Now Top Gold Bug

Sales of existing homes in the Chicago metropolitan area sank 19.2 percent in April from the same month last year, and the median price fell 14.5 percent, the Illinois Association of Realtors said Thursday.

As I said in February 2007...call me in 2013 and we'll talk about a bottom in the U.S. real estate market at that time. I lifted this short Chicago Sun-Times article from yesterday's King Report...and the link is here.

Europe is poised to install France's finance minister at the helm of the International Monetary Fund, infuriating the world's emerging nations.

European politicians, keen that the new chief is sympathetic to the eurozone' debt crisis, have been scrambling to agree on a candidate before emerging nations settle on a rival contender.

This story was posted in The Telegraph late last night...and I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along...and the link is here.

Fitch said that the downgrade reflected the massive challenges the country faces in implementing cuts, tax rises and other reforms needed to secure its solvency.

Investors took flight as the rating of the Greek government's debt moved three notches further into 'junk' status, at 'B+'. The spread between 10-year Greek and German government bond yields, a gauge of the risk of holding Greek debt, touched a record 13.73 percentage points.

This is another story from The Telegraph late last night...also courtesy of Roy Stephens...and the link is here.

Reader Tony in South Carolina sent me the following zerohedge.com piece yesterday that's worth a read.

"...with Norway which is a member of the European Economic Area, and actually one of the few solvent and non-basket case European countries saying let the chips fall where they may, it is just the first. Look for every other country currently on the sidelines vis-a-vis Greece [and just as insolvent] to follow suit as the European experiment falls apart."

This is a short read...and the link is here.

Thousands of protesters who are camped out in Madrid's central Puerta del Sol square and in dozens more Spanish cities have pledged to defy an order to pack up their tent cities and leave.

A tense standoff between police and protesters looked inevitable as interior minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba warned that authorities would uphold the law.

"Police know exactly what they have to do," he said, without specifying. "Their actions will depend on what happens."

This is another Roy Stephens offering from The Guardian...and the link is here.

Here's your first really big read of the day...and it's something that reader G.G. sent to me earlier this week, that I've been saving for today's column.

Normally I wouldn't give a piece like this the time of day, but since it showed up in the May 14th edition of The New York Times, I think it's worth the read.

Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, who resettled in the U.A.E. last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.

As I said, it's a longish piece...and the link is here.

Here's the Bloomberg story about China's gold consumption. The WSJ article on this bore the headline "China is Now Top Gold Bug"...and the chart associated with that article is posted above.

Gold imports by China may increase after investment demand more than doubled in the first quarter, with the country overtaking India to become the largest market for gold coins and bars, the World Gold Council said.

China produced 340 metric tons of gold last year and consumption was about 700 tons, leaving a gap of 350 tons to 360 tons, Albert Cheng, Far East managing director at the council, said yesterday. “With increasing demand in China we will have to rely on imports to fill the gap between demand and supply.” China is the world’s largest gold producer and second-largest in overall consumption.

Chris Powell sent me this must read story...and the link is here.

Here's a 3-in-1 GATA release that saves me the trouble of wordsmithing each one individually. I've read all three [the Russell blog was posted in my Thursday column, so you can skip it if you've already read it]...but the other two blogs are worth your time...and the link to all three blogs is here.

Since I posted that GATA release above, Eric sent me the full audio interview with John Hathaway...and the link is here.

Here's a story from yesterday's edition of The Wall Street Journal that was sent to me by Washington state reader S.A. Since it was subscriber protected, I had to get Chris Powell to post it in the clear, which he was kind enough to do.

Seth Lipsky is editor of the New York Sun. An anthology of its editorials on the gold standard, "It Shines for All," will be out this month from New York Sun Books.

This is an absolute must read from one end to the other...and the link is here.

This interview was imbedded in a GATA release yesterday...and, as I am wont to do, I'm just going to steal Mr. Powell's preamble and post the link.

Jeff Berwick of The Dollar Vigilante has written a wonderful interview with Hugo Salinas Price, president of the Mexican Civic Association for Silver, about his proposal for Mexico to re-monetize silver in a gentle and subtle way conducive to savings by the broad public.

The interview is posted over at silverseek.com...and the link is here.

Here's a story about silver that was posted over at msnbc.com yesterday...and is courtesy of reader Craig Eubanks.

Dave Crume, vice president of A-OK Pawn and Retail in Witchita, Kan., and president of the National Pawnbrokers Association, says he's buying a lot more silver these days, a phenomenon which his fellow pawnbrokers report experiencing, as well. "I'm probably seeing a 300 percent increase, at least," he says.

This is not an overly long story...and its worth your time. The link is here.

Stacy Herbert, editor of the Max Keiser Report, rebuts in careful detail the claim that silver is in a bubble. In fact, Herbert writes, today's interest in silver is a tiny fraction of the interest back in the days of the Hunt Brothers' infamous foray into silver.

I stole this story...and the introduction...from another GATA release yesterday...and the link is here.

The Zimbabwean dollar is no longer in active use after it was officially suspended by the government due to hyperinflation. The United States dollar, South African rand, Botswanan pula, Pound sterling, and Euro are now used instead. The US dollar has been adopted as the official currency for all government transactions with the new power-sharing regime, says Wikipedia.

This is a very interesting read that's posted over at commodityonline.com...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for sharing it with us...and the link is here.

Here's your second big read of the day. This story was sent to my by reader Bill Moomau a couple of days back...and because of its length, it ended up as weekend reading material.

One has to wonder what the hell J.P. Morgan and the Pentagon are doing looking for gold in Afghanistan...and I wonder what China makes of all of this?

To Hannam, chairman of J.P. Morgan Capital Markets, Afghanistan represents a gigantic, untapped opportunity -- one of the last great natural-resource frontiers. Landlocked and pinioned by imperial invaders, Afghanistan has been cursed by its geography for thousands of years. Now, for the first time, Hannam believes, that geography could be an asset. The two most resource-starved nations on the planet, China and India, sit next door to Afghanistan, where, according to Pentagon estimates, minerals worth nearly $1 trillion lie buried. True, there is a war under way. And it's unclear how the death of Osama bin Laden will impact the country's political and economic environment. But Hannam is not your usual investment banker: A former soldier, he has done business in plenty of strife-torn countries. So have all the members of his team, two of them former special forces soldiers who have fought here.

As I said, this is a long read which...as a non-American, I found profoundly disturbing. The link is here.

Back in 2003, Bob Landis, a partner with Reg Howe over goldensextant.com, wrote a fanciful and very tongue-in-cheek story about the debauchery that probably/maybe occurs at the IMF meetings. Bob calls them the "International Monetary Fraud"...which is what the IMF truly is. It [and the World Bank] are American-controlled organizations that have basically raped the 'third world' for the benefit of the American Empire.

In light of the fact that the IMF's previous grand poobah, one Mr. Dominique Strauss-Khan, is now rotting in a New York jail on rape charges, I thought this story was more than apropos...so I asked Mr. Landis to dig this old [horse] chestnut out of his archives...and here it is.

I would suggest that a couple of glasses of wine before you start to read would be appropriate. The link is here. Enjoy!