Bernard Madoff’s victims will soon receive $2.48 billion to help cover their losses, by far the largest payout since the swindler’s massive fraud was uncovered nearly four years ago.

Checks ranging from $1,784 to $526.9 million were mailed Wednesday to 1,230 former customers of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, according to Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating the firm.

The latest payout more than triples the total recovery to $3.63 billion, Picard said Thursday. Thus 1,074 customers with valid claims, or 44 percent of the total number, will be fully repaid, he added.

Customers had previously recovered $1.15 billion, including sums committed by the Securities Investor Protection Corp., which helps customers of failed brokerages. The average payout in Wednesday’s distribution was $2.02 million.

This story showed up on The Washington Post's Internet site on Thursday sometime...and I thank Donald Sinclair for our first story of the day. The link is here.

Peregrine Financial Group customers will receive their first payout — totaling roughly $123 million — after a federal bankruptcy judge Thursday approved a distribution plan from trustee Ira Bodenstein.

The first wave of funds will go to customers with accounts totaling less $50,000, and will be distributed on or before Oct. 8. A second distribution to be made on or before Oct. 29 will include customers with account balances of more than $50,000, provided that the trustee’s office is able to determine the validity to those accounts.

This short story showed up on the futuresmag.com website yesterday...and is Donald Sinclair's second offering in a row. The link is here.

A U.S. Senate panel probing the multibillion-dollar trading loss by JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) plans to unveil its findings at a hearing this year to press regulators to tighten the Volcker rule, according to three people briefed on the matter.

Staff members of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Senator Carl Levin, have interviewed JPMorgan officials as well as examiners and supervisors at the institution’s regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiry isn’t public.

One focus of the queries is whether JPMorgan’s wrong-way bets on derivatives would have been permitted under regulators’ initial draft of the Volcker ban on proprietary trading, the people said. The lender lost $5.8 billion on the trades in the first six months of the year.

This Bloomberg story from yesterday was sent to me by reader 'David in California'...and the link is here.

The Fed's policies of keeping interest rates at zero and buying mortgage-backed securities are intended, we're assured, to bolster the housing market by making it cheaper for buyers to borrow money. With mortgage rates under 4% and a trillion (soon to be two) dollars of dodgy mortgages transferred from the banks' tottering balance sheets to the Fed's wonderfully opaque balance sheet, then this appears plausible. But of course it's all a PR ruse, like everything else the Fed says.

If the Fed wanted to "save" housing and not the banks, why not buy mortgages directly from homeowners? Instead of buying underwater mortgages from the banks, why not just buy the entire $10 trillion of residential mortgages outstanding and charge the homeowners the same rate the Fed charges banks, i.e. zero?

The Fed's goal is not to relieve debt-serfdom, it's to enforce it. The entire purpose of the Fed's policies is to ensure homeowners keep paying interest to banks for the rest of the lives, and to encourage those who are not yet debt-serfs to join the serfdom with a "cheap" mortgage.

This short story by Charles Hugh Smith was posted over at the financialsense.com Internet site yesterday...and is your first must read of the day. I thank reader U.D. for bringing it to our attention...and the link is here.

"Our economic structure certainly enjoys unmatched capacity to absorb Credit excess without engendering traditional consumer price inflation. Yet there is indeed a huge problem that no one seems to want to recognize: Our system also has an unprecedented capacity to expand Credit that is backed by little in the way of wealth-creating capacity. Our government literally throws Trillions at the economy – Credit that inflates incomes and sustains consumption and elevates asset prices. The downside of this economic miracle is that, at the end of the day, there’s little left to show for the whole exercise except for an ever-expanding mountain of suspect financial claims. Moreover, market values of these claims are sustained only by the unrelenting expansion of additional claims/Credit. This is Minsky’s “Ponzi Finance” at a systemic level."

Doug's 'big picture' view of the world's credit markets are always worth reading...and his missive from yesterday certainly falls into that category. The link is here.

In order to restore the country's debt sustainability, Greece's lenders are reportedly considering further relief in the form of a partial debt haircut for the crisis-wracked country, the Financial Times Deutschland reported on Friday.

Citing unnamed "euro-zone sources," the paper said the focus was on bilateral loans from the currency union's first bailout program for the country, the nearly €53-billion ($69 billion) Greek Loan Facility, which ran from May 2010 to the end of 2011. "There is a discussion," a high-level official told the paper.

Martin Blessing, chairman of Germany's second-largest bank, Commerzbank, has also said a second debt haircut is likely. "In the end we will see another debt haircut for Greece, in which all creditors will take part," he said on Thursday in Frankfurt.

Sooner or later, all the world's debt will disappear...either by hyperinflation or by default. This story appeared on the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for his first offering of the day. The link is here.

The global financial crisis and double-dip recession in many countries has left Germany largely unscathed in recent years, but there are signs that trend may be reversing. Luxury German carmaker Daimler announced on Thursday that this year it would no longer reach the €5 billion ($6.52 billion) in operating profits it recorded in 2011. Prior to the announcement, the company had hoped to match last year's earnings.

"The overall market in Europe is deteriorating, with more negative developments than expected," Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche told reporters in Stuttgart. Bloomberg has also reported that the current European car market is the worst in 17 years and that problems are starting to spread into the luxury automobile sector, once thought to be immune from the crisis.

On Friday, the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper reported on alleged plans by Daimler to introduce €1 billion in cost-cutting measures.

Luxury car companies have been largely buffered from the crises that have rocked mass automobile manufacturers like Fiat, Opel, Ford and Peugeot in recent years, because wealthy customers in Russia and China have continued to purchase expansive sedans. Daimler has been able to rely on strong sales in Germany, the United States and China to keep its bottom line healthy.

This is another story from the spiegel.de Internet site yesterday...and this one is courtesy of Donald Sinclair. The link is here.

Russia has ordered the United States to end its financial support for a wide range of pro-democracy, public health and other civil society programs here, in an aggressive step by the Kremlin to halt what it views as American meddling in its internal affairs.

The Kremlin has taken a number of actions in recent months to bring pressure on nongovernmental groups and clamp down on political dissent, including a new law requiring any organization receiving aid from abroad to register with the justice manager as “acting as a foreign agent.” Russia also increased the penalties for libel and slander — a step that seemed intended to intimidate critics of government officials.

Russia is not alone in its resentment of United States-led democracy building efforts. Those have become a sore point for a number of countries in recent years, including allies like Egypt and Pakistan, which have objected to outside groups telling them how to run their affairs. The aid agency’s cold war history of providing a front for American intelligence agencies is still fresh in the memories of foreign officials, many of whom have never fully dropped their suspicions.

The abruptness of Russia’s announcements represents a sour new turn in relations between the countries, which have been touch-and-go since Mr. Putin returned to the presidency in May.

Fronts they are! Russia and the rest of the countries that have these U.S.-funded agencies know exactly why they're there. This story was posted on The New York Times Internet site on Tuesday...and I've been saving it for today's column. I thank Roy Stephens for sending it...and it's worth the read for any serious student of the "New Great Game". The link is here.

As the war in Syria rages next door, Turks have grown increasingly weary of nearly daily reports of troubles at home: Iranian spies working with Kurdish insurgents, soldiers ambushed and killed, millions spent caring for a flood of refugees, lost trade and havoc in border villages.

“This is how we start our morning,” Mehment Krasuleymanoglu, a bookseller in a narrow alley in central Istanbul, said recently as he laid out several newspapers, each with a blaring headline about an explosion at a munitions depot that killed more than two dozen soldiers. The government called it an accident, but in the current environment, many Turks, including Mr. Krasuleymanoglu, are not so sure.

“What do we have to do with Syria?” he said. “The prime minister and his wife used to go there for tea and coffee.”

The Turkish government is facing a spasm of reproach from its own people over its policy of supporting Syria’s uprising; hosting fighters in the south, opposition figures in Istanbul and refugees on the border; and helping to ferry arms to the opposition. While many Turks at first supported the policy as a stand for democracy and change, many now believe that it is leading to instability at home, undermining Turkey’s own economy and security.

This is another story from the Tuesday edition of The New York Times...another offering from Roy Stephens...and another must read for all students of the "New Great Game". The link is here.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said islands at the heart of a dispute between Japan and China fall under an American defense pact with Japan, while urging the sides to resolve the standoff via diplomacy.

“We want to focus more on issues associated with the maintenance of peace and stability and less on the particular details of this very complex and challenging matter,” Campbell told a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s East Asian and Pacific Affairs subcommittee yesterday. He said the islands fall under a treaty which obligates the U.S. to defend Japan if it’s attacked.

The U.S. doesn’t take a position on the sovereignty of the islands, known as Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese, Campbell said. His comments echoed those of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said in 2010 that the islands fall under “mutual treaty obligations” with the Japan government.

This Bloomberg story was filed from Beijing early yesterday morning...and I thank Manitoba reader Ulrike Marx for finding it for us. The link is here.

The first blog is with Egon von Greyerz. It's headlined "Gold, Silver, the US, Europe & the Tungsten Scare". The second blog is with Caesar Bryan...and it's entitled "Gold to Advance Another $700 - $1,200 Within Months". The audio interview is with Dr. Keith Barron.

One person died and four were injured when police clashed with protesters blocking a road leading to top gold miner Barrick's Peruvian mine Pierina, company and police officials said on Thursday.

Protesters were demanding that the mining company provide water infrastructure to towns near the mine, which sits 13,400 feet (4,100 m) high in the Andes, when the clash occurred late on Wednesday.

So far 19 people have died in clashes over natural resources since President Ollanta Humala took office in July, 2011. Peru's human rights agency says there are hundreds of lingering disputes over water, mining, and oil projects in rural Peru.

This 3-paragraph Reuters story was filed from Lima...and was posted on the mineweb.com Internet site on Thursday...and I thank Donald Sinclair for bringing it to our attention. You've already read the whole thing...and the link to the hard copy is here.

The Reserve Bank of India is planning to set up a panel to suggest a roadmap to tap into India's gold holdings reports CNBC-TV18's Siddharth Zarabi.

RBI and the finance ministry have discussed various possibilities and are considering four different instruments. India's gold holdings exceed 18,000 tonnes and have a market value of over $900 billion.

Gold bonds would help in reducing the weakness of the rupee.

The panel is expected to present its report in a couple of weeks.

These four short paragraphs are all there is to this story posted over at the firstpost.com Internet site on Thursday evening India Standard Time. We'll find out pretty quick whether the RBI is serious, or just setting up another scam. I thank Mumbai reader Avinash Raheja for bringing this story to my attention...and now to yours. The link to the hard copy is here.

We discussed Bridgewater's Ray Dalio in depth late last week and his historical perspective on the world we are living through. It appears CNBC has found this intriguing too and the largest hedge fund manager in the world has been espousing his views all morning.

Most notably he very concerned at the possibility for social unrest (just as we have pointed out again and again) highlighting the rise of Hitler in 1933 and its parallels to the current social disruptions around the world as global economies suffer painful de-leveragings.

His suggestion is that gold "should be part of everybody's portfolio" as he explains the reality of the endgame of fiat monetary systems. As far as Warren Buffett's distaste for the yellow metal, he opines "I think he is making a big mistake."

This short piece posted over at the zerohedge.com Internet site yesterday, has an embedded must watch video. It only runs for 2:40 minutes, but is jam packed. Not too many shades of gray in this interview. I thank Phil Barlett for finding this for us...and the link is here.

Yesterday's Mining Journal Gold Day in London differed from the norm in that as well as seeing presentations for a few companies it started with two keynote presentation on gold and the gold price by Ross Norman of Sharps Pixley and Charles Gibson of Edison Research and while both approached the subject from slightly differing angles their ultimate conclusions on where the gold price is headed were remarkably similar.

Ross Norman was the first to speak and looked at the long term pattern of gold price appreciation having been driven initially by fundamentals, but latterly by the global economy - but also concluded that on the patterns shown by other bull markets the current gold bull could have some way to run yet which would likely see the gold price rise to unprecedented levels, but at the moment very much driven by the huge increases in U.S. monetary supply to which the rising gold price bears a very strong relationship. With Europe and now Japan following a similar path this is not just a U.S. phenomenon.

On the bull cycle front Norman concluded that these bull cycles tend to last for around 17 years trough to peak and on this basis there would be around 7 years or more yet to run. He also commented on the gold bubble argument so popular with gold's detractors and came to the strong conclusion that this is not the case. Gold is not yet following a bubble pattern but he did concede that it does have the capability of meeting some bubble characteristics at some stage in its climb.

Here's another article from the mineweb.com Internet site yesterday...this one by Lawrence [Lawrie] Williams, Mineweb's General Manger and Editorial Director. I thank Ulrike Marx for her second and final offering in today's column...and the link is here.

More high-net-worth individuals are seeking to buy gold to protect their wealth from the risk of rising inflation after central banks boosted stimulus, according to Deutsche Bank AG’s asset and wealth-management unit.

“Gold has historically been considered to be a store of value and an inflation hedge and increasingly it is being utilized as a monetary instrument,” said Mark Smallwood, head of Asia-Pacific wealth-management solutions. “There is a growing interest among our clients to gain exposure,” he said, with an increased preference for physical holdings.

Gold is in the 12th year of a bull run, 13.5 percent higher this year, as investors seek to hedge against weaker currencies and the threat of rising consumer prices. Holdings in gold- backed exchange-traded products expanded to an all-time high yesterday, and Bank of America Corp. and Deutsche Bank are among banks forecasting that the price will rally to a record.

This story showed up on the Bloomberg website early yesterday morning...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for sending it along. The link is here.

There is nobody on Planet Earth that keeps closer track of what's going on in SLV than Warren James. His work is nothing short of amazing...and that certainly includes what he's got to say in his latest commentary over at screwtapefiles.blogspot.com.au. I thank Nick Laird for bringing this to my attention...and the link is here.

Warren's twice-weekly analysis of SLV's bullion inventory is linked here...and it's worth following.

This 14-page analysis of second quarter hedge book activity was sent to me by reader U.D. yesterday. The further one gets into this report, the more ones eyes have a tendency to start to glaze over...and when you reach that point yourself, it's time to move on to my next story of interest.

This report is posted in PDF format on the Gold Field Mineral Services website...and the link is here.

Chinese and Venezuelan officials signed an agreement Friday to jointly develop one of the world's largest gold mines.

The agreement to develop the Las Cristinas gold mine was signed by officials of the Venezuelan government and the Chinese company China International Trust and Investment Corp., or Citic. The mine in southern Bolivar state has been estimated to hold about 17 million ounces of gold.

President Hugo Chavez called it an agreement to begin exploiting both gold and copper deposits at the mine. He called Las Cristinas "one of the biggest reservoirs of gold that exists -- not only in Venezuela, not only in Latin America, but in the world."

This AP story showed up on The Washington Post website yesterday...and I plucked it from a GATA release. It's worth reading...and the link is here.

Kitco News' Debbie Carlson reports that U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Bart Chilton said today at the Hard Assets Conference in Chicago that the commission's investigation of the silver market continues, he expects to say something about it soon, and he continues to believe that the market has been subject to illegal activity.

I thank Chris Powell for the headline and the introductory paragraph...but the first person through the door with this story yesterday was Roy Stephens...and it's his last contribution in today's column. The link is here...and it's certainly a must read.