James Grant, publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, appeared on "Bloomberg Surveillance" with Tom Keene and Sara Eisen on Thursday morning and said that the Federal Reserve needs to "get out of the business of central planning."

Of the stock market, Grant said, "I think we live in a hall of mirrors in finance thanks to the zero interest rate regime and the chronic nonstop interventions. We do not know exactly where we are." Grant also said that he "would like to see the Fed admit it can't do what it promises to do" at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium this week.

"It needs to get out of the central planning business. The Fed was organized in 1914 and opened its doors to conduct a more or less traditional central banking business, meaning it would lend against good collateral to solvent institutions in times of cyclical or seasonal need. It would defend and protect the gold dollar. That was all that its original remit contained. fast forward many decades, and we see the Fed in the business of steering, guiding, manipulating the economy, financial markets, the yield curve. It manipulates and pegs interest rates. It is all over the joint doing what failed in the old eastern bloc."

This Bloomberg story, along with the imbedded video clip, was posted over at the safehaven.com Internet site yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for his first offering of the day. It's definitely worth your time...and the link is here.

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.

The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.

This very long read by Matt Taibbi was posted on the Rolling Stone Internet site early Wednesday morning...and is also contained in the September 13, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. I thank Australian reader Wesley Legrand for sending it along...and the link is here.

America's 50 state governments owe $4.19 trillion, including outstanding bonds, unfunded pension commitments and budget gaps, according to a new report.

At $617.6 billion, California had by far the biggest total debt, more than twice the total of No. 2, New York, with $300.1 billion owed, according to State Budget Solutions, a research and non-partisan advocacy group.

Texas, with $287 billion owed, New Jersey, with $282.4 billion, and Illinois, with $271.1 billion, ranked next among states with the biggest total debt, according to State Budget Solutions. Vermont had the smallest debt load at $5.85 billion.

This Reuters story was posted on their in.reuters.com Internet site late on Tuesday evening India Standard Time...and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

The capital of high tech is now the capital of high-priced real estate.

Silicon Valley currently leads the nation in the number of homes sold for $1 million or more, according to Realtytrac. Sales of $1 million-plus have more than doubled in many communities in the Valley this year, toppling longtime luxury real-estate leaders like Beverly Hills or Miami.

Topping the list is Saratoga, Calif., in Santa Clara County, which had 225 homes sold for $1 million or more. That marked a 162 percent increase over last year.

Ranked second was Burlingame, Calif., which had 211 sales of at least $1 million, more than double last year’s rate. Cupertino and Los Altos ranked third and fourth in the nation, with 175 homes and 170 homes respectively.

This CNBC story was filed on their website yesterday morning Eastern time...and is Elliot Simon's second offering in a row in today's column. The link is here.

Barclays Plc faces a criminal probe into fees it paid in 2008 to Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund as the bank sought to raise money to avoid a government bailout.

The Serious Fraud Office, which prosecutes bribery and white-collar crime, told the London-based bank it has “commenced an investigation into payments under certain commercial agreements between Barclays and Qatar Holding LLC,” the lender said yesterday in a statement.

The investigation is another legal pitfall for Britain’s second-biggest lender by assets after it paid U.S. and U.K. authorities a record 290 million pounds ($459 million) in June for manipulating the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and related interest benchmarks. The case led to the resignations of three top Barclays executives, including Chief Executive Officer Robert Diamond.

This story was posted on the Bloomberg Internet site late yesterday afternoon...and it's Elliot's third and final offering in today's column. The link is here.

Jens Weidmann, the 44-year-old head of Germany's central bank, has made a name for himself by championing price stability and opposing bond purchases by the European Central Bank. In a SPIEGEL interview, he criticizes the ECB's latest plans and insists he only wants to secure the euro's long-term future.

Here he is in a short Q&A session with a reporter from Spiegel ONLINE. I thank Donald Sinclair for sending it...and the link is here.

Defusing leftover bombs from World War II hidden in the ground beneath German cities has long been routine. The area surrounding the dud is evacuated, experts arrive to defuse the explosive and before long, normality returns. Often, such operations hardly even warrant a mention in the back pages of local newspapers.

That, however, was not the situation in Munich on Tuesday night. Unable to defuse a 250 kilogram (550 pound) bomb found buried one meter (three feet) deep at the site of the former bar Schwabinger 7 in the heart of the Bavarian capital, authorities elected to detonate the explosive on site. The controlled blast, finally carried out just before 10 p.m., sent a fireball into the night sky, shattered windows in the vicinity and resulted in several small fires on surrounding rooftops. Nobody was hurt.

"Almost all the window panes in the immediate area were destroyed," Diethard Posorski, from the Munich bomb disposal authority, told journalists. A fire department spokesman added: "It looked quite spectacular."

This Roy Stephens offering is also from yesterday's edition of spiegel.de...and it's worth reading. The link to this short story is here.

For the past three years, there has been little in the way of good news coming out of Southern Europe. But, on Wednesday, a new German study provided a rare glimpse of hope, suggesting that the crisis-struck countries may finally be turning the corner.

The study by the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), commissioned by the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper, showed that the countries in crisis are becoming more competitive, based on two key indicators.

According to the study, unit labor costs have fallen significantly in Greece, Ireland and Spain. Labor costs particularly fell in Greece, dropping by about 15 percent since 2010, according to the study.

However, all the debt is still there, so it matters little at this point in the game as to how much productivity is improved. It's like doing an upgrade on the deck chairs on the Titanic.

This is another short story from the spiegel.de Internet site...and once again I thank Roy Stephens for sending it our way. The link is here.

The first is headlined "Iran's oil export surpass 2 million barrels/day". The second story is entitled "India determined to continue co-operation with Iran". Both news items are courtesy of Roy Stephens...and are his last contributions in today's column.

Customers are taking longer to make payments and even defaulting on debt in a number of China's industries, particularly machinery, coal and steel, and there is a risk of this spreading to other sectors, the state-run Economic Information Daily reported Wednesday, citing results of a ministry inspection.

At a closed-door meeting held by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, five associations representing the steel, nonferrous metals, coal, electric power and machinery industries, reported their overall debt levels, and data showed that accounts receivable in the machinery and coal industries were high, the newspaper said.

The report said accounts receivable in the machinery industry in the first half of the year rose 17.3% on year to 2.49 trillion yuan ($392 billion). The report also said the net value of accounts receivable at 90 big and medium-sized coal companies surged 48.7% on year to CNY194.8 billion as of the end of July.

This Dow Jones story showed up on the nasdaq.com Internet site yesterday...and it's Elliot Simon's third and final offering in today's column. It's very much worth reading...and the link is here.

"If you like anchovies on your pizza you'd better be careful," warns Mark Livingston, investment director of Fidelity Worldwide Investment.

You would not expect the head of a global asset fund managing £138bn of pensions and investments to care about the cost of pizza toppings. But the global nature of the food chain means severe storms off the coast of Peru have led to a dramatic jump in the price of the oily fish – which will in turn lead to a spike in Scottish farmed fish, Chinese pigs and even Omega 3 tablets in Holland & Barratt.

"That's the nature of today's food business – everything's connected," Livingston says. "If you can catch some anchovies you'll make some serious money."

This very interesting read popped up on the guardian.co.uk Internet site early last Friday evening...and I thank Casey Research's own Alex Daley for digging it up on our behalf. The link is here.

Well, Doug and I may be at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to price management in the precious metal markets...but we are cheek-to-jowl when it comes to our outlook on peak oil.

Yesterday's edition of Conversations With Casey was on that exact subject. Louis James asked all the right questions...and Doug went after them like a pit bull.

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

The first blog is with Keith Barron. It's headlined "Expect $2,000 Gold & A Massive Squeeze In A Key Commodity". The second blog is with Agnico Eagle CEO, Sean Boyd...and it's entitled "Agnico CEO Warns Gold To Hit $3,000 On Supply Concerns". The last blog is with Robert Fitzwilson, founder of The Portola Group. It bears the title "How To Survive The Coming Chaotic & Catastrophic Markets". The audio interview is with John Hathaway.

Barrick's long-time penchant for global public policy issue management may have cast the unwanted glare of the public spotlight on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's chief of staff.

On Tuesday, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird personally defended Nigel Wright, the prime minister's chief of staff, declaring Wright "has no personal or financial interest in Barrick Gold Corp."

Nevertheless, a spokesperson for Canada's Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson, told CBC News that the agency is following up with Wright after the disclosure made in recent Barrick lobbying reports that Wright was contacted twice by Barrick in May.

This story was filed from Reno, Nevada yesterday...and is posted on the mineweb.com Internet site. There's not a thing in here that surprises me...and you should look carefully at the present [and past] list of board members that are prominently mentioned in this article. At one point, Barrick had sold forward about 24 million ounces of gold...more than four years worth of their production and 30% of yearly world gold production. It's a must read for sure...and I thank Donald Sinclair for finding it for us. The link is here.

An under-reported development of this campaign season is the Republican Party's decision this week to send Gov. Mitt Romney into the presidential race on a platform effectively calling for a new gold commission. The realization that America's system of fiat money is part of its economic problem is moving from the fringes of political discussion to the center.

This is a sharp contrast from the last time a gold commission was convened, in 1981, a decade after President Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods system and opened the era of a fiat dollar. The 1981 commission recommended against restoring a gold basis to the dollar. But two members, Congressman Ron Paul and businessman-scholar Lewis Lehrman dissented and outlined the case for gold.

The new platform doesn't use the word "gold," describing the 1981 United States Gold Commission as looking at a "metallic basis" for the dollar. But the metal was gold, and the new platform calls for a similar commission to investigate ways "to set a fixed value for the dollar."

Mr. Lipsky is editor of the New York Sun. This story showed in the pages of The Wall Street Journal yesterday...and it's posted in the clear in this GATA release. It's well worth your time...and the link is here.

The 10th annual Silver Summit will be held Thursday and Friday, October 25 and 26, at the Davenport Hotel in Spokane, Washington, and will feature presentations by GATA favorites Eric Sprott of Sprott Asset Management, Peter Spina of GoldSeek and SilverSeek, Al Korelin of the Korelin Economic Report, David Morgan of The Morgan Report, Bix Weir of the Road to Roota newsletter, Roger Weigand of the Trader Tracks newsletter, Ron Hera of Hera Research, and CPM Group Managing Director Jeff Christian. Many silver mining companies will be exhibiting. Admission is $40.

The rest of Chris Powell's GATA dispatch on the Silver Summit, plus a copy of the press release, is linked here.

Within a span of two months, India increased the import duty on gold almost four times this year, leading to increased smuggling of the precious metal, data shows.

As gold prices have hit the roof in India, an unprecedented increase in the smuggling of the precious metal is being witnessed. Indian authorities are seeing a spike in undeclared gold being smuggled into the country.

The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence recently detained two airport personnel who allegedly helped smugglers take contraband gold out of the Mumbai international airport.

The Directorate has seized 5.5 kilo of gold in this instance and another 4 kilo just two days ago. In mid-August, the Directorate arrested a person at Jaipur airport with 2.5 kilograms of gold hidden in his socks. Investigations revealed that the accused had smuggled gold over 20 times in the past few months alone.

This mineweb.com story was filed from Mumbai yesterday...and I thank Manitoba reader Ulrike Marx for bringing it to my attention...and now to yours. It's a must read...and the link is here.