MF Global customers who closed their accounts in the brokerage firm’s final days have been fuming for months about how the firm mailed checks to them, instead of promptly transferring the money electronically as usual. Many of those checks arrived after the bankruptcy filing, and subsequently bounced.

Now customers are taking action, trying to show that MF Global delayed the return of their money to cover the firm’s own bills and stay afloat. They are amassing client documents and submitting them to federal investigators in hopes of building a criminal case against MF Global executives.

While clients of MF Global say that it was unprecedented for the firm to abandon a longstanding business practice to wire money to customers who were closing accounts, the documents are not definite proof of wrongdoing. In recent weeks, federal authorities have come to suspect that MF Global’s actions amount to sloppy record-keeping, rather than criminal fraud.

This story appeared in The New York Times on Sunday...and I thank Phil Barlett for sending it along. The link is here.

Runaway government debts have triggered uncontrolled money printing that in turn will lead to inflation that will decimate portfolios, according to the latest forecast from "Dr. Doom" Marc Faber.

Investors, particularly those in the "well-to-do" category, could lose about half their total wealth in the next few years as the consequences pile up from global government debt problems, Faber, the author of the Gloom Boom & Doom Report, said on CNBC.

The good doctor is never one to mince words. This cnbc.com story was sent to me by West Virginia reader Elliot Simon yesterday...and the link is here.

This is Jim Rickards’ submitted testimony as a witness in the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy hearing entitled: “Retirement (In)Security: Examining The Retirement Savings Gap”.

It was posted over at the financialsense.com website yesterday...and I thank reader U.D. for bringing it to my attention. It's a little on the long side, but for Rickards junkies/groupies...it's probably not long enough. The link is here.

U.S. regulators are accusing one of Canada's largest banks of engaging in hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal futures trades to reap tax benefits on its holdings of company stocks.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed civil charges Monday against Royal Bank of Canada, saying the bank made the sham trades with itself. The agency said it is the largest case it has brought against so-called wash trades, which cancel each other out. Royal Bank of Canada engaged in "a wash-trading scheme of massive proportion," the CFTC said.

In addition, the agency alleged that the bank concealed the true nature of the trades and made false statements to a futures trading exchange, OneChicago.

The first person through the door with this story was Florida reader Donna Badach, but I'm using this AP story that was picked up by finance.yahoo.com yesterday. Casey Research's own Jeff Clark brought it to my attention...and the link to this must read article is here.

Market analyst and financial letter writer Charles Biderman this week gave two good interviews concentrating on bailouts and market rigging, one with Dan Ameduri of Future Money Trends -- and the other with financial writer Chris Martenson.

The first interview runs 19 minutes...and the second for 36 minutes. Both are posted in this GATA release...and the link is here.

Nothing has been more disappointing and frustrating to GATA in its nearly 13 years of fighting gold and silver market manipulation than the refusal to acknowledge the issue by many of those who have affected to be devoted friends of the monetary metals and free markets.

GATA Chairman Bill Murphy long has called this the 'Not Invented Here Syndrome', a matter of the intellectual vanity of prima donnas who can't bring themselves to admit that mere upstarts might discover anything profound in the prima donnas' field. From 45 years in journalism the experience of your secretary/treasurer is that most endeavors are full of people whose success has made them so arrogant that they think that nothing could be happening if they don't know about it already. (While journalism inclines its practitioners to the exactly opposite position -- to realize every day how much more they don't know -- it doesn't necessarily give them the courage to report what they learn.)

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

This 15-minute video was posted over at goldseek.com yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along. The link is here.

The first one bears the title of "Iran oil embargo raises threat of new global recession"...the second is headlined "Iran bids barewell to sanctions on oil industry: oil minister". And lastly is this story headlined "Indian budget 2012 exempts Iranian oil payments from income tax". All are courtesy of Roy Stephens, for which I thank him. The last one is the most interesting.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble ultimately had to concede defeat. Last Friday, Schäuble, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), voted in favor of the massive euro-zone bailout packages whose sheer size makes most people's heads spin. "The euro area is mobilizing an overall firewall of approximately €800 billion, more than $1 trillion," the Euro Group, which consists of the euro-zone finance ministers, proudly announced.

But this breakthrough could soon be reversed by further setbacks. There's a good chance that the beefed-up bailout fund won't work, despite its billions of euros in firepower.

This time the problem won't be the German government but rather the German parliament, the Bundestag. Since the Bundestag insists on having a say on every minute detail involving the rescue fund, it's making life more difficult for the would-be euro rescuers. A number of instruments that the euro-zone governments only agreed to after fierce wrangling will thus probably remain permanently toothless, and possibly never be implemented.

This story was posted over at the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and is certainly worth skimming. I thank Roy Stephens for sharing it with us...and the link is here.

Europe’s long-running euro crisis may be cooling. But the economic distress it has left in its wake is pushing a rising tide of workers into precarious straits in France and across the European Union. Today, hundreds of thousands of people are living in campgrounds, vehicles and cheap hotel rooms. Millions more are sharing space with relatives, unable to afford the basic costs of living.

These people are the extreme edge of Europe’s working poor: a growing slice of the population that is slipping through Europe’s long-vaunted social safety net. Many, particularly the young, are trapped in low-paying or temporary jobs that are replacing permanent ones destroyed in Europe’s economic downturn.

Now, economists, European officials and social watchdog groups are warning that the situation is set to worsen. As European governments respond to the crisis by pushing for deep spending cuts to close budget gaps and greater flexibility in their work forces, “the population of working poor will explode,” said Jean-Paul Fitoussi, an economics professor at L’Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris.

This story appeared in the Sunday edition of The New York Times...and is another Roy Stephens contribution to today's column. The link is here.

Tensions over tax evasion have flared up between Germany and Switzerland once again with the weekend announcement of Swiss arrest warrants for German tax inspectors accused of industrial espionage. The spying charges have opposition politicians so riled up that a tax evasion prevention deal currently under negotiation between the neighboring countries may now be at risk.

While both countries have signalled their willingness to sign the deal, they still need parliamentary approval -- which is now at risk after Swiss prosecutors on Saturday issued arrest warrants for three German tax inspectors from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The officials had federal approval to buy stolen bank information leaked from Credit Suisse in 2010, a move that triggered a wave of tax declarations by Germans seeking to avoid tax evasion charges.

The pending deal would require Switzerland to impose taxes on accounts held by Germans, in addition to handing out fines for undeclared assets, but would spare the country from having to reveal the identities of its valuable wealthy banking customers. With this, Berlin hopes to collect unpaid taxes on an estimated €130 billion to €180 billion socked away in the Alpine haven by its citizens.

This story was posted over at the spiegel.de website yesterday...and is worth the read. It's also Roy's last story in today's column. The link is here.

The first blog is from Ross Clark of CIBC [Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce]. It's headlined "Gold Bull Market set up for a Spectacular Move". The second blog is with Jim Sinclair...and it bears the title "Central Banks Buying Gold as Part of the Cure". The third is a blog with Robert Fitzwilson of The Porta Group. It's headlined "Central Banks Stockpiling Gold & Governments Hoarding Oil". The fourth blog is from John Williams. It's titled "Consumers Crushed & Economy Collapsed". It's worth the read. And lastly is the audio interview with Hugo Salinas Price. The blog of this interview appeared in this space on Saturday.

The state treasurer's office seems to have discovered GATA's work and to have fully adopted our conclusions, as it tells the legislature: "Similar to other commodities, the value of gold and silver is determined by supply and demand, as well as speculation. The Federal Reserve, London Bullion Market Association, JP Morgan Chase, and HSBC Holdings have practiced fractional-reserve banking and engaged in naked short selling causing artificial price suppression."

The report was about the advisability of investing state funds in gold and silver.

Chris Powell has posted the South Carolina treasurer's 6-page report on the GATA website just in case it goes 'missing' from the official government website...and the link is here.

It may be more desirable than ever, but gold is so expensive that more of us are selling jewellery rather than buying it. Emma John goes on the trail of the precious metal and discovers who's getting their fingers on it

This longish article about gold that showed up in The Guardian on Saturday bearing the headline "Gold Rush: what happened to bling?". It's a very interesting read...and I borrowed the headline from a GATA release. The link is here.

Interviewed by Dan Ameduri of Future Money Trends, Endeavor Silver and Canarc Resource Corp. CEO Bradford Cooke explains Endeavor's concurrence with Sprott Asset Management CEO Eric Sprott's call for gold and silver mining companies to start treating their metal inventories as money. I lifted this from another GATA release yesterday. The interview is in two parts and can be watched at the futuremoneytrends.com website. The two interviews run about 14 minutes in total...and the link to both is here.

Reader Drew Mason had this op-ed piece posted over at the forbes.com website back on March 25th...and he sent it my way yesterday. It's certainly worth reading...and the link is here.

The latest episode of the History Channel program "America's Book of Secrets" was broadcast on Saturday night...and GATA and our secretary/treasurer, Chris Powell, played a big part at its beginning and toward its end, separated by a lot of odd tangents that, while they do not involve GATA's work, may keep the lay viewer engaged until GATA's main points are pressed emphatically: market rigging and the likely encumbrances on the U.S. gold reserve. The program is 44 minutes long and, for the time being at least, full video of it is posted over at the hulu.com website...and the link is here. [NOTE: At the moment, this video is only available to viewers inside the United States. If/when it becomes available in the public domain elsewhere on Planet Earth, I'll be sure to bring it to your attention]

This story was posted over at the marketwatch.com website yesterday...and I borrowed it from another GATA release. It's certainly a must read...and the link is here.

"Sometimes people call us gold bugs. I can understand why, since gold and silver and related equities are our favorite investments at this time. But of course, the term suggests a semi-religious attitude about gold and an unwillingness to move on, even when it becomes obvious that it is time to move on."

"Doug Casey likes to say that he'll know it's the top of the market when there's an image of a golden bull tearing up the NYSE on the cover of SLIME (TIME) magazine - and that he can't wait to blow out his portfolio at some high multiple of its current value... hardly the words of a fanatic who will never change course."

These are two paragraphs from the introduction to yesterday's edition of Casey's Daily Dispatch as written by Louis James, the senior metals investment strategist over at Casey Research.

The introduction...along with the essay itself...are must reads...and the link is here.