A few weeks ago, Morgan Stanley's head global economics Joachim Fels sent a note to clients entitled Into the Twilight Zone. In the note, the group downgraded its global growth forecasts, reflecting increasing pessimism across Wall Street on the future of the world economy.

Fels just put out an update today, writing that "recent disappointing data suggest that the global economy is sinking ever deeper into the twilight zone that divides sustainable recovery from renewed recession."

This story was posted on the businessinsider.com Internet site late yesterday afternoon...and it's Roy Stephens first offering of the day. The link is here.

The court battle against the permanent euro bailout fund, the ESM, has become the largest in German legal history. Yet despite widespread concerns, fund head Klaus Regling is preparing for action. The most important question surrounding the fund, however, remains to be answered: Will it work?

The temporary EFSF rescue fund is about to give way to its permanent successor institution, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

Before that can happen, though, the ESM must still clear some legal hurdles. On Sept. 12, the German Constitutional Court will rule on lawsuits seeking to prevent the government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel from participating in the new bailout fund with its €700 billion ($880 billion) firewall.

Some 37,000 Germans have joined the complaint, making it the largest such case in the history of the court. Most prominently, however, the list of plaintiffs includes Peter Gauweiler, a politician with the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), former Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin of the center-left opposition Social Democrats (SPD), and a group of professors led by economist Wilhelm Hankel, a prominent critic of the euro. They all fear that joining the rescue fund necessarily means that Germany's parliament would lose its constitutionally guaranteed right to oversee the budget.

This story appeared on the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and it's original title "Permanent Euro Bailout Fund ESM prepares to go live despite law suits" was changed to what you see above. It's Roy Stephens second offering in a row. The link is here.

Mario Draghi has delivered his radical bond buying plan to the European Central Bank’s Governing Council in a move designed to equip the eurozone with a powerful new weapon to curb its debt crisis.

Leaked versions of the Draghi Plan revealed that the ECB president has proposed unleashing a bond buying effort that would be ‘unlimited’. The central bank would also relinquish its senior status among creditors, a measure seen as critical to encouraging private bond investors.

The plan would stop short of British and American-style quantitative easing (QE) because the ECB would still seek to “sterilize” its bond purchases, or take the equivalent amount of money out of the system elsewhere.

This Roy Stephens offerings showed up on the telegraph.co.uk Internet site early yesterday evening BST...and the link is here.

The Financial Service Authority (FSA) said it would introduce tougher regulations to force banks to scrap the schemes which it found were “likely to drive people to mis-sell in order to meet targets and receive a bonus.”

“Twenty out of the 22 firms we assessed had features in their incentive schemes that increased the risk of mis-selling,” the FSA said in a consultation paper issued yesterday.

The regulator said that as a result of its findings one firm had already been referred to its Enforcement and Financial Crime Division.

Martin Wheatley, director of the FSA, said the “bonus-based approach” had fuelled the raft of mis-selling scandals. “Incentive schemes on Payment Protection Insurance were rotten to the core and made a bad problem worse,” he said.

This story was posted on The Telegraph's website early yesterday afternoon BST...and it's another item from Roy. The link is here.

If Citigroup is right, Saudi Arabia will cease to be an oil exporter by 2030, far sooner than previously thought.

A 150-page report by Heidy Rehman on the Saudi petrochemical industry should be sober reading for those who think that shale oil and gas have solved our global energy crunch.

I don't wish to knock shale. It is a Godsend and should be encouraged with utmost vigour and dispatch in Britain. But it is for now plugging holes in global supply rather than covering the future shortfall as the industrial revolutions of Asia mature.

The basic point – common to other Gulf oil producers – is that Saudi local consumption is rocketing. Residential use makes up 50pc of demand, and over two thirds of that is air-conditioning.

This AE-S blog is your first must read of the day...and it was posted on the telegraph.co.uk Internet site yesterday. I thank Roy Stephens for his last offering in today's column...and the link is here.

Bring home the bacon, or the speck, as it were, was the guiding principle for German Chancellor Angela Merkel when she frolicked in China last week. But her pleas to get the Chinese to buy the crappy bonds of debt-sinner countries in the Eurozone fell on deaf ears. This week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was hobnobbing with the Chinese elite. It turned into a clash fest, and instead of bringing home the bacon, she argued with the Chinese over everything and the South China Sea.

Merkel was accompanied by seven ministers and a delegation of executives from EADS, subsidiaries Airbus and Eurocopter, Volkswagen (which sells nearly a third of its cars in China), Siemens, Thyssen-Krupp, SAP.... Three planes stuffed with Germany’s political and corporate elite. It wasn’t about human rights or Syria or the South China Sea, but about trade.

This piece was posted over at Zero Hedge yesterday...and I thank reader Marshall Angeles for bringing it to our attention. The link is here...and it's worth skimming.

The first is with Dr. Marc Faber...and it's headlined "The Most Dangerous Trend Facing the World Today". Next is Citi's Tom Fitzpatrick. It bears the headline "Expect $2,500 Gold & Silver to Smash All-Time Highs". The third blog is with the venerable Richard Russell...and it's entitled "Gold to Save World From Drowning in Debt". Lastly is this audio interview with James Turk.

Marikana miners have threatened to kill Lonmin management unless they stop operations at the platinum mine in North West.

The threat was made by representatives of hundreds of protesting workers who marched to Lonmin's Karee mine, from Marikana on Wednesday.

The five representatives told manager Jan Thiroun that management had Wednesday and Thursday to close the mine's K3 shaft or they would end up dead and the mine would be burnt down. The shaft is where most of the mine's operations take place.

This story, filed from Johannesburg, appeared on the mineweb.com Internet site yesterday...and I thank Manitoba reader Ulrike Marx for sharing it with us. The link is here.

Lonmin and unions representing mineworkers at the strike-hit Marikana platinum mine in South Africa have signed an accord for a return to work, but a militant breakaway union was not part of the deal, union officials said on Thursday.

The fact that the militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) had not signed last night's accord left questions about how many striking miners at Marikana would in fact heed the agreement and go back to work.

On Wednesday, more than 3,000 striking miners marched through streets near the mine, the largest protest at the hot spot since police shot dead 34 of their colleagues last month.

"There is a peace accord that was signed last night that calls on workers to return peacefully to work and that negotiations will then open with the parties so that the issue of wages can be discussed," Lesiba Seshoka, spokesman for the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), one of unions which signed the deal, told Reuters.

This Reuters story was posted on the mineweb.com Internet site earlier this morning BST...and I thank Ulrike Marx for this story as well. The link is here.

Mineweb has learnt that both the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction union (AMCU) interim workers committees have demanded a second annual wage increase from miner Impala Platinum.

This is after workers received their annual increase early in April this year after a violent six week long strike brought the Rustenburg operations to a standstill.

The interim union committees were set up whilst a member verification process was underway to establish how many NUM members had defected to rival union AMCU.

Alice Lourens, group corporate relations manager, at Implats would not supply detail on the wage demand suffice to say that it was engaging in discussions on the matter and that the verification process had not yet been completed.

This was another story from the mineweb.com Internet site yesterday. It, too, was filed from Johannesburg...and the link is here.

GATA Chairman Bill Murphy's appearance on the Russia Today television network's "Capital Account" program, hosted by Lauren Lyster, has been posted at over at youtube.com...and the link is here.

GoldMoney Research Director Alasdair Macleod, interviewed by the German media relations firm Cometis, says Western central banks are trying to suppress the gold price so that they may sustain their policy of negative real interest rates, but that Eastern central bank purchases have put a floor under the price.

I plucked this story from a GATA release yesterday...and I thank Chris Powell for wordsmithing the headline...and the introduction. The interview is translated into English at the GoldMoney.com Internet site here.

Turkish gold imports fell to 11.3 tonnes in August from 35 tonnes a month earlier, according to data released by the Istanbul Gold Exchange on Wednesday.

Gold imports in the first eight months were 105.43 tonnes. In 2011 as a whole, imports amounted to 79.70 tonnes, almost doubling from 42.49 tonnes a year earlier. Turkey's gold imports last August were 17.14 tonnes.

Turkey's gold imports are typically higher during summer months as the metal is traditionally given as a gift at weddings and circumcision ceremonies.

This 3-paragraph Reuters story showed up on the mineweb.com Internet site yesterday...and I thank Donald Sinclair for sending it our way. The link to the hard copy is here.

As GATA treasurer Chris Powell says in his opening preamble..."Maybe it's because the Russian government has known about the Western gold price suppression scheme since learning about it from GATA in 2004...Maybe it's because the Chinese government knows all about it too...Maybe it's because practically everybody in the gold market knows about it except those who get their news and commentary only from the Western financial media."

The links to the three imbedded GATA articles are even more important than the marketwatch.com story to which the headline refers...and I urge you to spend whatever time is necessary to read all of them. All of the above was posted over at the gata.org Internet site yesterday...and the link is here.

I could hardly believe my eyes and ears when this Bloomberg video from yesterday showed up in my in-box early yesterday afternoon. It only runs for 4:34 minutes...but it's a must watch for sure. I thank Washington state reader S.A. for digging it up on our behalf...and the link is here.