Writing at King World News, ShadowStats editor John Williams argues that evidence of economic recovery in the United States turns bogus when government-doctored inflation data is discarded and real inflation data is used. Williams predicts that more debt monetization will be employed to prop up banks while being portrayed as economic stimulus.

I borrowed this introduction from the GATA press release. This blog is posted over at KWN website...and the link is here.

The TSA’s had a banner week. It began with former Head Cheese, Kip Hawley – the guy who foisted the liquids-in-baggies nonsense on us – bleating that the agency is “broken” and it’s no wonder Americans hate it. As if to prove him right, screeners beat up on little girls – twice. And it was only Monday. By Wednesday, cops had arrested four screeners at Los Angeles International who took a break from pawing passengers to smuggle illicit drugs through checkpoints. Meanwhile, a Congressman alleged assault after a “very aggressive … pat-down.”

Hmmm. Seems there are several clues here that perhaps we might want to, oh, I don’t know, abolish this vile agency.

This story was posted over at the forbes.com website yesterday...and I thank 'Jan from Denmark' for sharing it with us. The link is here.

Texas congressman Ron Paul spent about 45 minutes on CNBC on Monday...and although I haven't had time to listen to the whole thing, what I have heard is worth your time. I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for sending it to me earlier this week...and the link to the youtube.com video is here.

In perhaps the most courageous (and likely must-read for future economists) speech ever given inside the New York Fed's shallowed hallowed walls, Economic Policy Journal's Robert Wenzel delivered the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to the monetary priesthood. Gracious from the start, Wenzel takes the Keynesian clap-trappers to task on almost every nonsensical and oblivious decision they have made in recent years.

"My views, I suspect, differ from beginning to end... I stand here confused as to how you see the world so differently than I do. I simply do not understand most of the thinking that goes on here at the Fed and I do not understand how this thinking can go on when in my view it smacks up against reality."

But his closing was tremendous:

"Let’s have one good meal here. Let’s make it a feast. Then I ask you, I plead with you, I beg you all, walk out of here with me, never to come back. It’s the moral and ethical thing to do. Nothing good goes on in this place. Let’s lock the doors and leave the building to the spiders, moths and four-legged rats." [Rather than the 2-legged variety. - Ed]

No shades of grey here. The entire speech is posted over at zerohedge.com...and I thank Elliot Simon for his second offering in a row in today's column. The link is here.

The financial system is simply unable to make enough money off the real economy in order to even survive its past episodic spasm of over-speculation, describing the scale of dysfunction as something far greater than anyone perhaps realizes.

In many ways the system is at a terminal crossroads, as it cannot function without the synthesization of so much credit, but the real economy may not be able to survive the resource drain and monetary inefficiency that this much synthesization requires. Intermediation was supposed to be a tool for the real economy. Now the real economy is nothing more than a support system for the global investment banking regime.

In bailing out the banking system, central banks have put their money on the wrong horse since banks are almost completely disconnected from their true role as a tool of the real economy. The labyrinth of complexity and intentional opacity is designed to hide this fact. Real credit is shrinking throughout the system, but synthetic credit is alive, well and flourishing. The financial system now exists to its own exclusive benefit.

This eye-opening essay was posted last December over at the realclearmarkets.com website. I came close to zapping this without reading it, but persevered...and was glad I did. It's a rather longish read, but very much a must read in my opinion. I thank reader Julius Adams for sending it...and the link is here.

For years, Zimbabwe was infamous for the opposite problem: mind-boggling inflation. Trips to the supermarket required ridiculous box loads of cash. By January 2009, the country was churning out bills worth 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, which were soon so worthless they would not buy a loaf of bread (the notes now circulate on eBay, as gag gifts).

But since Zimbabwe started using the United States dollar as its currency in 2009, it has run into a surprising quandary. Once worth too little, money in Zimbabwe is now worth too much.

“For your average Zimbabwean, a dollar is a lot of money,” said Tony Hawkins, an economist at the University of Zimbabwe.

Zimbabweans call it “the coin problem.” Simply put, the country hardly has any. Coins are heavy, making them expensive to ship here. But in a nation where millions of people live on a dollar or two a day, trying to get every transaction to add up to a whole dollar has proved a national headache.

This story was posted in The New York Times earlier this week...and is another Elliot Simon offering. It's an interesting read...and the link is here.

Way back in heady days of 2009, we gave you 6 reasons to move to Iceland.

Well, we actually spent some time there last month — and guess what!

You should still move.

In fact, there's even more reasons now.

This 18-slide businessinsider.com story was posted on their website on Wednesday...and I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along. The link to Reason #1 is here.

The London arm of the great vampire squid paid only £4.1m in corporation tax to the Treasury last year. Despite pocketing £1.9bn in pre-tax profits.

Lord Blankfein’s investment bank received a tax bill of £422.3m for 2011 but has put off paying 99pc of it until next year.

Just to put that in context that’s 38pc of the entire Government annual spend on energy and climate change, and nearly 9pc of UK cash spent on transport last year.

The Inland Revenue must be fuming. Maybe not. Last year the tax men “let off” Goldman to the tune of £10m.

What’s £418.2m between friends, eh?

This story was posted on the telegraph.co.uk website yesterday morning...and you've just read all of it. I thank Roy Stephens for sending this out way...and the link to the hard copy is here.

Opposition parties in The Netherlands have salvaged budget-cutting plans designed to protect the country's triple-A rating and to meet EU targets.

The left-wing Christenunie, the liberal D66 and the Groenlinks parties on Thursday (27 April) got behind the minority caretaker government of centre-right leader Mark Rutte to give him a 77-out-of-150 majority in parliament for the measures.

The details on the €10-billion-or-so package are to be worked out at a later stage.

This is another Roy Stephens offering...and this one was posted over at the euobserver.com website early on Friday morning. The link is here.

It's so nice to see Europe in agreement once again. Whether it's German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso or French presidential candidates François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy -- everyone seems to think a "growth pact" for the continent is a good idea. But it is precisely this agreement that should make one skeptical -- because all the vague phrase really does is verbally lump together Europe's tremendous conflicts of interest.

The suggestion came from European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi. "We have had a fiscal compact," Draghi told the economic and monetary affairs committee of the European Parliament on Wednesday, referring to the treaty European governments signed in March, pledging to toughen their spending rules. "What is most present in my mind now is to have a growth compact."

But the unanimous approval of Draghi's suggestion conceals just how far apart its proponents are on details. What ECB President Draghi has in mind has little to do with Socialist Hollande's notions. "He doesn't necessarily have the same measures in mind as me to foster growth," Hollande admitted in a radio interview on Thursday. But this disagreement has somehow been overlooked.

This story was posted over at the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and is another contribution from Roy Stephens. The link is here.

The unemployment rate in the eurozone's fourth largest economy hit 24.4pc, the highest in the industrialised world, in the first quarter of this year, signalling that one-in-four Spaniards is out of work. Among under 25s the rate climbed to 52pc.

At least 1.7m households now have no wage earner, an increase of almost 10pc since the start of the year.

Retail figures for March, meanwhile, showed sales fell for a 21st consecutive month, as the country's deep recession bit down on consumer spending.

"The figures are terrible for everyone and terrible for the government," said Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, the foreign minister. "Spain is in a crisis of huge proportions."

This story was posted in The Telegraph late yesterday afternoon...and I thank Roy once again for sending it along. The link is here.

The conflict between the European Union and the Ukrainian government over its treatment of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko appears to be entering a new, more intense stage.

German President Joachim Gauck has decided to cancel his planned trip to a summit in Ukraine in May, and on Thursday German Chancellor Angela Merkel indicated that she might not travel to the European Football Championship, which Ukraine is co-hosting in June. There have been calls for Germany to boycott the tournament in protest over the Ukrainian government's treatment of Tymoshenko.

On Friday, Ukraine was shocked by a series of attacks in the eastern city of Dnipropetrovsk, Tymoshenko's hometown. Four explosions went off in rapid succession there, injuring at least 27 people, including nine children. The first blast was caused by a bomb hidden in a trash can near a tram stop. The second, which happened 30 minutes later, was near a cinema, and the third on a busy street. A fourth blast was also heard in the city center.

This is another Roy Stephens offering from yesterday's edition of spiegel.de...and the link to that story is here.

Iran will sell oil under the market price to counter EU oil sanctions, said the National Iranian Oil Company’s director for international affairs.

Mohsen Qamsari added that certain U.S. companies were seeking an increase in global price of oil to make domestic unconventional extraction more competitive; he placed the price of oil in the U.S. by such methods at $90 a barrel.

“While the U.S. is trying to keep oil prices high, Iran can push aside many of its rivals in the international market by supplying cheaper oil,” Qamsari told the Mehr News Agency.

He said that profiteering dealers welcome high oil prices, adding that Iran will support low oil prices.

This story was posted in the Tehran Times yesterday...and is another story courtesy of Roy Stephens. The link is here.

Whether by terrorism or judicial order, the continuing displacement of Iraq’s Kurdish minority lays bare the unfinished business of reconciliation in the wake of the American military’s withdrawal, and it is a symptom of the rapidly deteriorating relationship between the semiautonomous Kurdish government based in Erbil and the central government in Baghdad.

The schism, which is most immediately over sharing oil wealth but is more deeply about historical grievances and Kurdish aspirations for independence, raises serious questions about the future of a unified Iraq. The crisis, American officials say, is far more grave than the political tensions between the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and the country’s Sunni Arab minority set off by an arrest warrant on terrorism charges issued in December for Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni vice president.

The Kurds, unlike the Sunnis, have their own security forces, oil reserves, ports of entry and even their own de facto foreign policy, with envoys operating in other countries. This could eventually lead them to seek more independence from Baghdad.

There are lots of things going on 'under the hood' in Iraq these days...and one of them is this issue here. Most of this deep 'historical grievances' date back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire...and how it was divided up by the western allies after World War One. A terrific book on this subject is linked here. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for this story that appeared in The New York Times last Saturday. I give another tip of the hat to Roy Stephens...and this is worth the read if you have the time. The link is here.

The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS a signal that we have truly entered a new multi-polar world?

Yale's canny historian Paul Kennedy (of "imperial overstretch" fame) is convinced that we either are about to cross or have already crossed a "historical watershed" taking us far beyond the post-Cold War unipolar world of "the sole superpower." There are, argues Kennedy, four main reasons for that: the slow erosion of the US dollar (formerly 85% of global reserves, now less than 60%), the "paralysis of the European project," Asia rising (the end of 500 years of Western hegemony), and the decrepitude of the United Nations.

The Group of Eight (G-8) is already increasingly irrelevant. The G-20, which includes the BRICS, might, however, prove to be the real thing. But there's much to be done to cross that watershed rather than simply be swept over it willy-nilly: the reform of the UN Security Council, and above all, the reform of the Bretton Woods system, especially those two crucial institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Of all the stories that I've posted in today's column so far, this is the one I would pick as the must read out of the whole bunch. This 2-page essay was posted over at the Asia Times website early on Saturday morning...and I thank Roy Stephens for sharing it with us. The link is here.

The U.S. and European economies are still sinking, money is rushing out of Spain's banking system, and demand for physical gold is exploding and will blow up the paper gold market before long, Eric Sprott and David Baker of Sprott Asset Management write today in the company's "Markets at a Glance" commentary. Sprott and Baker write:

"We have written at length about the disconnect between the paper gold price and the physical gold market. If the demand changes stated above applied to any other market, the investing public would lose their minds. Could you imagine, for example, if the demand shifts described above were applied to the global oil market? What would happen if a single country came in from nowhere and increased its oil purchases by a factor equivalent to 30% of the world's annual oil supply? We are students first and foremost of the physical market, and the numbers stated above speak for themselves. We remain confident about gold for the simple reason that the demand we are now seeing for physical is completely unsustainable without higher prices, and we do not see that demand abating in the coming months."

This is another must read story in today's column. It's posted over at the sprott.com Internet site...and the link is here.

Gold rose for a fourth consecutive session on Friday and posted its biggest weekly gain since late February, as disappointing U.S. growth and European debt jitters boosted investment demand for the precious metal.

Bullion buying accelerated after a report showed U.S. economic growth cooled in the first quarter as businesses cut back on investment.

Some safe-haven demand also supported prices after a credit downgrade of Spain's sovereign debt by Standard & Poor's.

Gold's four-day rise was underpinned by option-related buying and after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Wednesday the U.S. central bank would not hesitate to launch another round of bond purchases to boost growth if necessary.

This Reuters story was posted on their website yesterday afternoon...and is Roy Stephens' last offering of the day. The link is here.

Only a minuscule sliver of the so-called "smart money" has found its way into gold. Much of that bite-sized slice, moreover, has recently exited gold mining equities en masse as the entire sector has been buried alive. But when the smart money reacts predictably to near-term gyrations rather than long-term fundamentals, does it really deserve the name?

I believe the only move that the really smart money is making right now is toward gold rather than away from it. Gold continues to exhibit substantial resilience as it finds its footing around the $1,650 range, which gold expert Jim Sinclair correctly pinpointed as a significant price threshold more than a decade ago. I make it my business to understand gold, and I believe my conservative price target of $2,000 per ounce is already written in stone. In fact, I think it will prove laughably conservative.

This is the second offering from Christopher Barker in less than a week. It was posted over at the Motley Fool website yesterday...and it's definitely worth reading. The link is here.

Futures Magazine's Daniel P. Collins has done a comprehensive interview with gold advocate and mining entrepreneur Jim Sinclair that may be interesting even for Sinclair's many followers, as it covers not just gold but his more general economic views and some personal background. The interview is headlined "Jim Sinclair Has Something to Say".

I borrowed the above introductory paragraph from Chris Powell's GATA release. The story is posted over at the futuresmag.com website...and the link is here.

Sprott Asset Management's Eric Sprott told King World News yesterday that the world economy is not improving, that Europeans are losing confidence in their banking system and governments, that the world's debts can be handled only through currency devaluation, and that despite price suppression efforts in the futures markets, the markets for real gold and silver will break through.

This Friday blog, headlined "Global Shocks Coming, Investors Need to Prepare", is posted on the KWN website...and is also worth the read. The link is here.