The pig in the python is suddenly moving.

Thousands of foreclosures that were stuck in process due to delays over the so-called "Robo-signing" paperwork scandal are working their way through a revamped banking system and heading toward final bank repossession.

Foreclosure starts surged 28 percent in January from December, according to a new report from Lender Processing Services. More than 230,000 loans began the foreclosure process in January.

Even more indicative of this new surge in processing is that repeat foreclosures hit an all-time high in January, representing 47 percent of all starts, according to LPS. Repeat foreclosures are either failed loan modifications, or loans that banks were attempting to modify but couldn't.

This story was posted over a the cnbc.com website yesterday...and is West Virginia reader Elliot Simon's first offering of the day. The link is here.

A report released Monday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York renews concerns about the growing debt load of college students and graduates.

The report suggests that as many as 27 percent of the 37 million borrowers have past-due balances of 30 days or more.

“In sum, student loan debt is not just a concern for the young,” the report said. “Parents and the federal government shoulder a substantial part of the postsecondary education bill.”

The report, which was created by an analysis of Equifax credit reports, said the total balance of student loans was $870 billion. Of the 241 million with Equifax credit reports (there are 311 million people in the United States), 15 percent had student debt.

This story appeared in The New York Times on Monday...and was reprinted in this story posted over at cnbc.com. I thank Elliot Simon for his second offering in a row. The link is here.

The European Central Bank’s balance sheet surged to a record 3.02 trillion euros ($3.96 trillion) last week, 31 percent bigger than the German economy, after a second tranche of three-year loans.

Lending to euro-area banks jumped 310.7 billion euros to 1.13 trillion euros in the week ended March 2, the Frankfurt- based ECB said in a statement today. The balance sheet gained 330.6 billion euros in the week. It is now more than a third bigger than the U.S. Federal Reserve’s $2.9 trillion and eclipses the 2.3 trillion-euro gross domestic product of Germany (EUANDE), the world’s fourth largest economy.

The ECB last week awarded banks 529.5 billion euros for three years in the biggest single refinancing operation in its history, adding to the 489 billion euros it lent in December. The flood of money, which aims to combat Europe’s sovereign debt crisis by unlocking credit for companies and households, has increased the risk exposure of the 17 euro-area central banks that together with the ECB comprise the Eurosystem.

This Bloomberg story was filed from Frankfurt yesterday...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for bringing it to my attention. The link is here.

The Dutch Freedom Party has called for a return to the Guilder, becoming the first political movement in the eurozone with a large popular base to opt for withdrawal from the single currency.

"The euro is not in the interests of the Dutch people," said Geert Wilders, the leader of the right-wing populist party with a sixth of the seats in the Dutch parliament. "We want to be the master of our own house and our own country, so we say yes to the guilder. Bring it on."

Mr Wilders made his decision after receiving a report by London-based Lombard Street Research concluding that the Netherlands is badly handicapped by euro membership, and that it could cost EMU’s creditor core more than €2.4 trillion to hold monetary union together over the next four years. "If the politicians in The Hague disagree with our report, let them show the guts to hold a referendum. Let the Dutch people decide," he said.

The study said the eurozone cannot survive in its current form. The longer Europe’s politicians dither, the more costly it will become. "The euro can only survive if it becomes a fiscal transfer union with national sovereign debt subsumed in eurozone bonds," said co-author Charles Dumas.

This Ambrose-Evans Pritchard offering was posted in The Telegraph late on Monday night...and I thank Roy Stephens for sending it to me. The link is here.

Many in northern Italy have long wanted to secede. Now, the euro crisis is giving the separatist movement new momentum, with the rich north unwilling to pony up for the poor south. Prime Minister Monti's efforts to exert control may be making matters worse.

Money is at the core of the dispute. South Tyrol is expected to contribute €120 million ($161 million) to cleaning up the Italian national budget. To do so, it will have to raise real estate, value-added and income taxes, as well as fees paid by farmers -- measures that violate Rome's promise that 90 percent of the taxes collected in South Tyrol will stay in South Tyrol. On an almost daily basis, Durnwalder cites paragraphs from the reform package against which he intends to make his own case before the Constitutional Court.

What is happening in Italy's northernmost and wealthiest province mirrors the larger euro crisis: The rich north doesn't want to pay for the poor south. In the 1950s and 60s, this attitude was reflected in the "Away from Rome" movement, which, until recently, was considered just as outmoded as the prejudices of Northern Europeans against Southern Europeans that have now been brought to the surface by the crisis.

This is an amazing story...and a part of the Italian socio-political landscape that I knew nothing about. It's another Roy Stephens offering, this one from yesterday's edition of spiegel.de...and the link is here.

There are growing divisions among European Central Bank leadership about how to handle the euro crisis, not to mention between the ECB and the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank. While ECB head Mario Draghi is pleased with his recent decision to flood the markets with cheap money, Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann warns of the dangers.

Weidmann spoke at the Mexico summit, and he had an entirely different message for his listeners. "The crisis cannot be resolved solely by throwing money at it," he said.

There is a rift among top-ranking officials at the ECB, and it also extends between the majority of the ECB's Governing Council and the Bundesbank. First, two leading German ECB officials -- chief economist Jürgen Stark and Bundesbank President Axel Weber -- resigned because the monetary authority was buying up sovereign bonds from Greece and Portugal. Then Weber's successor Weidmann objected to the ECB's purchase of government bonds from heavily indebted Italy.

Now, Weidmann is rebelling against the manner in which Draghi is giving European banks one new cash injection after another. Although Weidmann admits that the measures are basically correct, their conditions are "very generous," he complains -- and expresses his total opposition to this policy in the jargon of the central bankers: "This can particularly become a problem if banks are discouraged from taking action to restructure their balance sheets and strengthen their capital base."

This is another Roy Stephens offering posted over at the spiegel.de website...and the link is here.

The above was the original headline to this Bloomberg story, before the 'thought police' changed it to read "Goldman’s Secret Greece Loan Reveals Sinners".

On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said.

Papanicolaou and his predecessor, Christoforos Sardelis, revealing details for the first time of a contract that helped Greece mask its growing sovereign debt to meet European Union requirements, said the country didn’t understand what it was buying and was ill-equipped to judge the risks or costs.

“The Goldman Sachs deal is a very sexy story between two sinners,” Sardelis, who oversaw the swap as head of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency from 1999 through 2004, said in an interview.

I ran a short interview about his issue a week or so ago...but this Bloomberg piece from Tuesday is far more in-depth. And, if you have the time, it's certainly worth the read. Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone magazine didn't call Goldman Sachs "the great vampire squid with its tentacles wrapped around the face of humanity" for no reason...and you can read all about it in this article.

I thank reader Brad Robertson for sharing this story with us...and the link is here.

More than a year ago, German economist Hans-Werner Sinn discovered a gigantic risk on the balance sheets of Germany's central bank. Were the euro zone to collapse, Bundesbank losses could be half a trillion euros -- more than one-and-a-half times the size of the country's annual budget.

The crucial clue came from the same man whose signature once adorned the deutsche mark: Helmut Schlesinger, former president of Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank. He was the one who pointed Hans-Werner Sinn, an economist in Munich, in the direction of a strange entry in the Bundesbank's statistics: In late 2010, records showed claims on other euro-zone central banks totaling over €300 billion ($400 billion). Curious, Sinn began to dig deeper. What he found exceeded his worst expectations.

"In the beginning, all I had was this number, and I didn't really know what it meant," says Sinn, who is president of the Munich-based Ifo Institute for Economic Research. "The Bundesbank told me those were irrelevant balances. But that didn't reassure me."

After weeks of work, Sinn had assembled enough pieces to create a picture that would make any one shudder: Since the 2007 financial crisis, immense imbalances have formed within the otherwise harmless payment system that exists between the central banks of the 17 euro-zone member states. While Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece, all hit hard by the debt crisis, show deficits totaling over €600 billion, the claims owed the Bundesbank have climbed to €498 billion.

This interesting read was posted on the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and is another Roy Stephens offering. The link to the 2-page story is here.

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton announced on Tuesday that the international community had agreed to resume talks with Iran on the country's controversial nuclear program. Tehran has even offered to open up one suspicious site to inspectors.

A key element in the decision to renew the talks was Iran's offer to allow United Nations inspectors to visit the Parchin facility, a place where Iranian scientists have allegedly simulated nuclear explosions. In January, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were not allowed access to the site, a move which ratcheted up tensions between the global nuclear watchdog and Tehran.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague issued a statement saying that pressure will "be on Iran to convince the international community that its nuclear program is exclusively peaceful." He added: "Until those actions are taken, we will not ease the international pressure on Iran."

This is another story from the German website spiegel.de...and another Roy Stephens offering as well. The link is here.

Gross domestic product grew by 2.7pc last year, down from 7.5pc growth in 2010, dragged back by higher business costs and lower industrial output. Economists had forecast a 2.8pc rise in gross domestic product. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, Brazil's GDP grew by 0.3pc in the final three months of 2011, against expectations of a 0.2pc rise.

Despite lower annual growth, economists at the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said Brazil still managed to take Britain's spot as the world's sixth-largest economy last year, behind the US, China, Japan, Germany and France.

"Brazil overtaking the UK is an indicator of the shift towards emerging markets in the global economy," said Tim Ohlenburg, senior economist at CEBR. "I think generally Brazil is a country with natural resources, a large productive population, a strong industrial base and so will do very well in years and decades to come. It's only a matter of time before it overtakes Germany and France."

This story was posted in The Telegraph last evening...and is Roy Stephens final offering of the day. The link is here.

“If you want to be long gold and silver, if you like real currencies as opposed to fiat currencies, you have to like days when you can buy it cheaply. I’ve been around this type of action for 35 years and I suspect, before I shed my mortal coil, I will purchase much more physical gold and silver bullion.”

This blog was posted at the King World News website last night...and the link is here.

Economist Shayne Heffernan reports on a looming showdown in Indonesia over new mining laws. The changes will bring pressure to the supply of Coal, Gold, Copper and many more metals/minerals.

Under the regulation, after May 7th no new contracts for exporting raw materials can be signed. The export ban will go into effect in 2014 for all companies, no matter what their existing contract of work stipulates.

Local representatives of major business associations in East Kalimantan have protested a government regulation that will ban the export of raw materials and unprocessed commodities, including coal.

“We explicitly refuse this policy. This will cause many coal mining companies to collapse,” Slamet Brotosiswoyo, the head of the Indonesian Employers Association (Apindo) in East Kalimantan, said on Monday. “This policy was made in a rush and we believe the government must review it.”

The joys of mining in a 'third world' country. This story was filed from Hong Kong yesterday...and is posted at the livetradingnews.com website. I thank Bob Fitzwilson for sending it along...and the link is here.

Gold isn't in a bubble ready to pop similar to the tech boom of 2000 or the real estate sector of a few years ago, says Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom and Doom report.

Gold may rise and fall amid price corrections, but it's nowhere close to being a bubble.

"A bubble phase is characterized by the majority of market participants being involved in a market space. I saw a gold bubble in 1979 — 1980, when the whole world was dealing — buying and selling gold 24-hours a day, globally," Faber tells The Gold Report.

I posted a Mark Faber interview in this column yesterday...and here's another one. This was posted over at the moneynews.com website yesterday...and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for bringing it to my attention. The link to this short read is here.

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd., the world's most valuable lender, said in a statement that its gold leasing business reached 62.8 tonnes of physical metal in 2011.

The bank, which started gold leasing in January last year, has more than 100 clients, including jewelers, industrial users, refiners, and miners, who borrow gold for up to a year. The bank charges a fee for the leased gold, which is returned within an agreed time period.

China became the world's top gold consumer in the October-December quarter of last year, surpassing India for the first time.

I extracted this very short Reuters piece from a GATA release yesterday. It was filed from Hong Kong...and the link is here.

Sprott Asset Management's John Embry told King World News yesterday that the smashes in gold and silver are entirely paper manipulations without real metal being sold, that economic conditions worldwide are deteriorating alarmingly despite enormous propaganda to the contrary, and that the monetary metals will be the ultimate beneficiary.

I thank Chris Powell for writing the above introduction for you...and the link to the KWN blog, which is headlined "Conditions are deteriorating at an alarming rate" is here.

For bling lovers who have already adorned their ears, wrists and fingers, a company called Mr. Kennedy offers a new way to shine: 24-karat gold shoelaces that will set the wearer back $19,000 (or for style mavens on a budget, $3,000 for a silver pair).

The Dublin-based outfit, named after Harvey Kennedy, the reputed inventor of the shoelace, makes the laces out of Colombian gold, which is compressed into thin threads, then hand-crocheted into a fine rope. The company says it will deliver the laces -- with their own security guard -- anywhere in the world, and adds that wearers don't need to worry about kicking up a little dust with their footwear finery; the laces can be cleaned with simple soap and water.

Don't laugh too hard, dear reader, as they'll probably sell a lot of them. There's plenty of stupid money out there looking for the next thing to blow it on. This was posted on the smartmoney.com website yesterday...and even if you don't read the story, the photo is worth the trip.

I thank Washington state reader S.A. for sharing this item with us...and the link is here.