Here's an amazing story that was posted over businessinsider.com over a week ago...and it's a long story as to why it took me this long to get around to posting it in this column...but my thanks to reader Robert Simmers for beating on me until I finally saw things his way.

Instead of doing everything in its power to stimulate reserve, and thus cash, accumulation at domestic (US) banks, which would in turn encourage lending to US borrowers, the Fed has been conducting yet another stealthy foreign bank rescue operation, which re-routed $600 billion in capital from potential borrowers to insolvent foreign financial institutions in the past 7 months. QE2 was nothing more (or less) than another European bank rescue operation!

Basically the Federal Reserve is bailing out the entire world with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of money made up out of thin air...which will never be repaid.

This is a longish must read, with excellent charts...and I urge you to spend the time necessary to digest everything that's in it. The link is here.

Here's a zerohedge.com piece courtesy of Australian reader Wesley Legrand. After a headline such as that, the story needs no further embellishment from me...and the link is here.

Here's a Reuters story that's posted over at news.yahoo.com...and is courtesy of reader Scott Pluschau.

Greece's debt crisis may be contagious and poses one of the biggest risks to global financial markets alongside Middle East uprisings, Citigroup's Chief Risk Officer told Reuters.

These guys at Citi have a keen grasp of the obvious...and the link is here.

Senior sources have revealed that leading banks, including Barclays and Standard Chartered, have radically reduced the amount of unsecured lending they are prepared to make available to eurozone banks, raising the prospect of a new credit crunch for the European banking system.

UK banks have pulled billions of pounds of funding from the eurozone as fears grow about the impact of a “Lehman-style” event connected to a Greek default.

This story from the Saturday edition of The Telegraph is courtesy of Washington state reader S.A...and the link is here.

Hours of talks between eurozone finance ministers on the imploding finances of Greece broke up early Monday morning without the ministers signing off on a vital installment of rescue loans needed to avoid bankruptcy next month.

What difference does it make, dear reader, as the money will never be repaid anyway...nor will any of the bailout money to any nation.

I thank Roy Stephens for this huffingtonpost.com story...and the link is here.

In a very surprising move, the AP reports that the UK finance minister George Osborne has announced a major overhaul of British banks, the key provision of which will be the separation of bank retail and investment business "in order to help avoid another financial crisis."

It's a bit of a read...and I once again thank Australian reader Wesley Legrand for sending me this zerohedge.com piece...and the link is here.

Osama al-Nujaifi, the Iraqi parliament speaker, has told Al Jazeera that the amount of Iraqi money unaccounted for by the US is $18.7bn - three times more than the reported $6.6bn.

Without doubt, the U.S. taxpayer got the bill for it. This aljazeera.net article was sent to me by reader Ken Metcalfe...and the link is here.

A number of readers were kind enough to send me various stories about what happened to Bitcoin during the previous week. I told the first two or three readers that sent me stories on it, that I wasn't going to run it...but changed my mind when this more in-depth piece showed up.

I posted a story about this virtual currency last week...and I considered it to be right up there with the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. Since that story last week, there have been major troubles for Bitcoin...

"The storm had been building for over a week now. Last Monday at around 5 p.m. 25,000 Bitcoins were transferred from 478 accounts on the currency's largest exchange -- Mt. Gox. But that was just the beginning. Now Mt. Gox is admitting to a major breach and has shut down, in an unprecedented action. In all, approximately $8.75M USD worth of Bitcoins appear to have -- at least temporarily -- been stolen in the intrusion."

Wesley Legrand sent me this story about it that's posted over at dailytech.com...and the link to all the gory details are here.

Here's Wesley's last offering of the day...this one from zerohedge.com...and the headline says it all.

The reason for the dramatic doubling of prices of some Rare Earths in just the month of June, if due to China, which has realized it has a complete monopoly on the supply, and as we predicted in October, would be only a matter of time, before it decided to see just how far it can push prices.

Let's hope they start pushing the silver price as well. The link to the story is here.

This KWN blog with James Turk is imbedded in this GATA release...and since Chris Powell has already done the heavy lifting, I'll just post the link to his efforts here. James also talks about the poor performance of the mining shares...and that part of the blog alone makes it a must read.

Central bank gold buying could soon be matched with other global banks if gold’s quality as an asset gets upgraded to Tier 1 status by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS).

Gold has historically been classified as a Tier 3 asset, with a net stable funding ratio of 50 percent. When determining how much money a bank can loan, the bank’s gold holdings have traditionally been discounted 50 percent of the current market value. With value cut in half, banks have little incentive to hold gold as an asset.

After years of being undervalued, a sentiment is building to have gold upgraded to Tier 1 status. This would level the investment playing field for the yellow metal and encourage banks to increase gold’s share of their reserves.

This short must read piece is posted over at usfunds.com...and was sent to me by reader Charley Orr. The link is here.

Frank Holmes, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of U.S. Global Investors has a second offering for us today...and it's also about gold.

Frank has this to say in his closing comments..."With gold companies currently undervalued and offering strong cash flows and attractive yields, we think gold equities will be rewarded by the market and rise with strong gold prices. BMO Financial analyst Don Coxe echoes our sentiment: “gold and gold stocks offer a protection that is going to become more valuable in the period of months ahead. It’s possible that the long-awaited period, when gold stocks outperform bullion, is coming soon.”

Of course, we can all hardly wait. This, too, is a must read...and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for sharing it with us. It's also posted over at usfunds.com...and the link is here.

Everyone has an opinion of what's going on with the mining stocks...and here's another one.

Chris Powell has wordsmithed the preamble already...so I'm just going to link the GATA release, as the link to the audio interview is posted there. The link is here.

In fact, because most retail establishments are now online, there's no reason said list couldn't be an electronic readout, specifying that a "red tag" item now costs, say, one ounce of silver, or 1/40th of an ounce of gold, with such prices updated electronically every day or even every hour, shifting as the commodity prices shift against each other.

This would eventually allow us to bypass the cumbersome and increasingly worthless "dollar" altogether.

There are only two obstacles to public acceptance of such an arrangement:

1) "Fractional reserve" banking would have to be outlawed as fraud in regard to the issuance of such "certificates of hard money deposit."

2) As soon as they threaten to gain any wide acceptance, the federal government now actually treats such helpful "honest money" systems as criminal. Witness the recent criminal prosecution of Bernard von NotHaus for minting his "Liberty Dollar" one-ounce silver coins.

This is a 2-part story. The first part has to do with the annual spring flooding in the Midwest and South...and the second part deals with the Liberty Dollar. The actual title to the article is "In favor of annual flooding and the Liberty Dollar". In my humble opinion, both parts are worth the read...and the link is here.

Here's a story that I ripped from a GATA release yesterday. It was a story posted in the Sunday edition of the Toronto Globe and Mail.

His breathing is laboured, his chest is tight, and he is too weak to work in his garden any more. At the age of 63, former mine worker Wilson Mafolwana wonders if he’ll still be alive when justice is done.

He is among the millions of migrant workers who toiled in South Africa’s gold mines in the apartheid era, building the world’s biggest gold industry – and often sacrificing their health in the process. Breathing clouds of dust, usually without ventilation masks, tens of thousands of miners contracted silicosis and tuberculosis, and many are now dying.

Mr. Mafolwana and 17 other ex-miners with silicosis have launched a test case against the South African unit of Anglo American, one of the world’s biggest mining companies, to seek compensation for their illnesses. But the case has dragged on for seven years, with no decision expected until next year at the earliest.

It's a sad story...and the link is here.

There are no surprises in this story that reader U.D. dug up over at zerohedge.com yesterday. Virtually all of Europe's [and probably America's] central banks have lent/leased out gold that they're never going to get back. But they still keep it on their books as gold on hand in their vaults, because the IMF allows them to do it.

GATA believes that over half of the 30,000 tonnes of central bank gold has been lent/leased into the market already...and the Central Bank's Agreement to sell gold over the last ten years or so, were just a cute way of writing off those loses without disturbing the price...as there was never any physical gold really sold.

This short, must read story about Belgium's central bank's gold is a case in point...and the link to this is here.

The import of gold and silver by India has risen by a whopping 222% between April and May 2011, as compared to a year ago. In the month of May alone, imports were a staggering $9 billion, with gold demand growing 25%.

"People in India have accepted high inflation as a reality of life,'' said Rajesh Shukla of the centre for Macro Consumer Research. Noting that Indians tend to use gold as a hedge against inflation, Shukla said this would be partly responsible for the spike in imports. He added that high imports reflected a strong demand for the yellow metal, despite the weakening of the rupee.

This story is courtesy of reader George Findlay. It was filed from Mumbai yesterday...and is posted over at mineweb.com. This is a must read as well...and the link is here.

Today's last precious metals story is another that I ripped from a GATA release yesterday.

This story was filed from the Xinhua News Agency in Beijing on Monday.

The People's Bank of China (PBOC), the central bank, announced today that it will issue more gold and silver commemorative coins featuring the giant pandas to meet soaring demands for precious metals in the country.

It's a very short must read story...and the link is here.