The overwhelming majority of Americans feel fiscal reform should take priority this election season, though few expect it to happen, said David Walker, former Comptroller General of the United States and current CEO of the Comeback America Initiative, which promotes fiscal reform and responsibility.

Walker recently concluded a “$10 Million a Minute Tour” bus tour, named after the speed at which unfunded promises are climbing, and reached out to Americans in 16 states and the District of Columbia to convey to largely undecided voters issues surrounding fiscal reform in the country.

“We found out 97 percent of the people we interacted believe our fiscal challenge is a major challenge and should be a top priority for the presidential candidates as well as other candidates for office, yet only 8 percent have confidence in their ability to work together to get something done in 2013,” Walker told CNBC.

This news item was posted on the moneynews.com Internet site on Tuesday during the New York lunch hour...and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for our first story of the day. The link is here.

What Citigroup Inc. has always needed is a leader who will be straight about the company’s finances, without spinning the facts. For that reason, the departure of Vikram Pandit as chief executive officer is progress.

To see the sort of games that Citigroup has been playing the past few years, check how the bank presented the results in its third-quarter earnings release on Oct. 15, the day before Pandit resigned. Under generally accepted accounting principles, the company said it had net income of $468 million for the quarter. On a non-GAAP basis, though, Citigroup said its earnings were $3.3 billion.

One of the items Citigroup excluded was a $2.9 billion loss related to selling its stake in its brokerage joint venture with Morgan Stanley. (MS) This is about as funny as you will ever see accounting humor get, and here’s why.

This rather short op-ed piece by Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil was posted on their Internet site early yesterday morning...and is worth your time. I thank Manitoba reader Ulrike Marx for sharing it with us...and the link is here.

Outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderon has signed into law a ban on large cash transactions. The ban will take effect in about 90 days and it is part of a broader effort to control monetary flows within the country.

Under the law, a Specialized Unit in Financial Analysis operating within the Attorney General’s Office will be created to investigate financial operations “that are related to resources of unknown origin.”

For real estate transactions, cash payments of more than a half million pesos ($38,750) will be forbidden and, for automobiles or items like jewelry, art, and lottery tickets, cash payments of more than 200,000 pesos ($15,500) will be forbidden. The law carries a minimum penalty of five years in prison.

This short story showed up at Forbes yesterday. I thank Washington state reader S.A. for sending it. Even if you don't read the article itself, the photo of $207 million in cash, make it worth your while to click on the link...which is here.

Mr. Volcker, an architect of banking reform proposals in the United States, said separating the two types of banking would be "effective to a considerable extent" in allowing risky parts of banks to fail without damaging the main business.

But he told a parliamentary inquiry on banking standards that putting the theory into practice was not easy.

"Based on the American experience, the concept that different subsidiaries of a single commercial banking organisation can maintain total independence either in practice or in public perception is difficult to sustain," Volcker told the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards.

Banking reforms in the United States, Britain and Europe all require "careful regulatory definitions and supervisory oversight" to ensure functions are kept separate, he said.

This story was posted on the telegraph.co.uk Internet site early yesterday evening BST...and I thank Donald Sinclair for sending it me in the wee hours of this morning. The link is here.

Britain will change the law to reform the Libor interest rate that was rigged by Barclays and other banks, the Treasury said on Wednesday. Barclays was fined a record £290m in June for manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate, a benchmark used as a basis for pricing products like home loans around the world worth over $300 trillion.

Martin Wheatley, managing director of the Financial Services Authority, published recommendations last month for reforming the setting, governance and regulation of Libor.

The Treasury said this afternoon that it will insert some of the recommendations into a financial bill now in the final stages of approval in parliament.

"The Government's changes to legislation will ensure that those that attempt to manipulate Libor face the full force of the law," UK financial services minister Greg Clark said in a statement.

I'll bet some big money that no one ever goes to jail over this...now, or in the future. This story was posted on The Telegraph website early yesterday afternoon BST...and it's the first of three in a row from Roy Stephens. The link is here.

The "worst may still be ahead" for Britain's banking sector, according to the Bank of England's deputy governor, as he warned that bank balance sheets were still not strong enough to withstand the "end-of-the-world risks" that still existed.

Paul Tucker told an audience at the British Bankers' Association: "There is a tangible probability – not a high probability – that the worst may still be ahead", and called on lenders to hold more capital.

The frontrunner to take over from Sir Mervyn King as governor of the Bank also called for an end to the get-rich-quick culture of the City.

Mr Tucker said that bank bosses should be partly paid in debt linked to financial performance to ensure they have a strong interest in their company's fortunes.

The guy talks the talk for the moment...but if appointed, will he walk the walk? This story showed up on the telegraph.co.uk Internet site early yesterday afternoon BST...and I thank Roy for his second story in a row. The link is here.

A Greek euro exit on its own would have a relatively minor impact on the world economy, but if it causes a chain reaction leading to the departure of other southern European nations from the single currency, the economic impact on the world would be devastating, a German study warned on Wednesday.

Economic research group Prognos, in a study commissioned by the Bertelsmann Stiftung, estimated that euro exits by Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy would wipe a total of €17.2 trillion ($22.3 trillion) off worldwide growth by 2020.

The researchers arrived at a particularly bleak assessment because they didn't just calculate the losses of creditors who had lent money to the crisis-hit nations. They also analyzed the possible impact of a euro collapse on economic growth in the 42 most important industrial and emerging economies that make up more than 90 percent of the world economy.

This story was posted on the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and it's Roy Stephens' third and final offering in today's column. The link is here.

GATA's friend and researcher R.M. writes today from Europe:

"If the U.S. judiciary deemed protection of the nation's currency or similar national interests (such as stable financial markets and oil prices) as justification not to prosecute a cartel's war against gold by federal authorities, foreign governments, and their agents, could anti-trust law ever be brought to bear against such activity in our lifetimes?

"What I'm asking essentially is: What is the Achilles' heel of gold market collusion that would provoke enforcement in a compromised judicial system?"

Chris Powell replied to R.M. as follows...

This GATA release by Chris Powell contains extensive links...and will keep you off the streets for the rest of the day. The link is here.

In the third and final segment of his interview this week, the London trader source of King World News says the London metals market has become a Ponzi scheme, that real silver especially is unavailable right now despite the huge volumes seemingly traded, that the Comex metals market is all about bluffing longs out of their positions, and that the commitment-of-traders reports on the metal futures markets are "groomed" and unreliable.

"Groomed" and unreliable...hmmm. If the COT Report [and the Bank Participation Report] was really groomed, they wouldn't show this massive short position held by the 'Big 4' traders...or show that JPMorgan, the Bank of Nova Scotia[?] and HSBC are short grotesque quantities of silver in the Comex futures market. I thank Chris Powell for the headline and the introductory paragraph...and the link to the KWN blog is here.

This rather longish speech was delivered by Bart before the 2012 Allegro Customer Summit in Dallas, Texas on Tuesday...and I thank Edmonton reader Ray Hay for bringing it to our attention. There's lot of good stuff in here, but Chilton says zip about silver. It's posted on the cftc.gov Internet site...and it's worth the read if you have the time. The link is here.

During the panic of 1792, the Bank of North America tried to stave off a run by having employees “carry its specie busily to and from the cellar in order to give a magnified notion of what it had,” historian Bray Hammond wrote. Bank managers “ostentatiously brought in deposits of gold and silver that had unostentatiously been carried out a little while before.”

The show of specie reassured jittery customers, saving the bank from failure. As a young clerk in Iowa during the panic of 1907, Hammond recalled employing exactly the same dodge: heaping impressively large sacks of low-value coin in plain view and ostentatiously counting it to give the impression of overflowing vaults.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt used a similar trick when he authorized the construction of the U.S. Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

The author of this essay, posted on the Bloomberg Internet site on Tuesday, is Michael O’Malley, an associate professor of history at George Mason University, and the author of “Face Value: The Entwined Histories of Race and Money.” It's a very interesting read...and I thank Elliot Simon for digging it up on our behalf. The link is here.

President Jacob Zuma waded into South Africa's churning labour crisis on Wednesday with a call for striking miners to return to work and for CEOs to freeze their pay, amid months of industrial unrest and bloodshed that threaten to derail the nation's economy.

After nearly five hours spent behind closed doors corralling business and labour leaders, Zuma emerged with a collective demand that tens of thousands of workers who have downed tools illegally go back to work.

“We call on workers who are engaged in unprotected strikes to return to work as soon as possible and for production in the mining industry to be normalised,” he said.

“Violence and intimidation must come to an end. These have no role in our system.”

This story showed up on the iol.za Internet site late on Wednesday evening South Africa Time...and I thank Ulrike Marx for sending it. This is worth reading...and the link is here.

The European debt crisis has prompted nervous wealthy investors to build holdings of gold in Asia and demand that banks allocate them individual bullion bars, a Deutsche Bank executive said.

"We've seen a huge pick-up in demand for physical (gold) holdings," Raymond Key, global head of metals trading, told Reuters.

"People are geographically moving out of Europe and into Asia and private wealth is becoming more sophisticated around how to manage credit exposure to banks, wanting to hold allocated physical metal in the right regions," he said in an interview.

This short 3-paragraph Reuters story from Tuesday was picked up The Economic Times of India...and I thank Ulrike Marx for her final contribution in today's column. The link to the hard copy is here.

Gold equities have never presented investors with a better opportunity than they do today, says Sprott Asset Management's John Embry.

Speaking on Mineweb.com's Gold Weekly podcast, the asset manager's chief investment strategist, said that this view is based on his view of where the price of gold is likely to go in the future.

Adding that, while all gold equities are likely to move, junior gold stocks have been beaten down significantly and are "much cheaper" relative to their senior counterparts.

"If you have the right quality junior (and you've got to be selective because there's a lot of junk in this sector as you know), but if you've got the right quality junior, I think you are talking five to 10 baggers easy."

This article, plus the link to the embedded podcast, is a must read/listen. I found it over on the mineweb.com Internet site in the wee hours of this morning...and the link is here.

It has been quite some time since my good friend and silver mentor, Izzy Friedman, has written something about silver. Devastated by the loss of his wonderful wife of 56 years, Gabriella, Izzy withdrew from his daily silver market observation and our telephone conversations in order to restructure his life around family and travel and contemplation. We have started to talk more frequently and he agreed to write something.

For those who may not be familiar with Izzy, it was a personal challenge from him to me almost 30 years ago that started me on my own silver journey. Back in 1985, Izzy asked me how it was possible for a commodity that was being consumed in greater quantities than was being produced could fail to rise in price, as was dictated by the law of supply and demand. There was no doubt that silver had been in a consumption deficit for decades, depleting world inventories all along, yet the price went nowhere. I could not answer his question, but was determined to do so. It took me a year to discover that the price was artificially depressed by excessive and concentrated short selling on the COMEX.

Once you are enlightened by the flame of knowledge, it doesn’t extinguish itself easily. My discovery of the silver manipulation, for better or worse, has been with me ever since. I have always felt in debt to Izzy for enabling me to see the silver manipulation, even when that knowledge seemed more like a curse, back in the 1990’s. The best part about Izzy was always his sound common sense and as the best sounding board possible. Even though he was skeptical of the silver manipulation at first, in reality he’s more responsible for today’s general knowledge and thinking on silver than any other single person. To this day, I remain convinced that his article back in 2007 on US Silver Eagles was the catalyst behind the surge in sales that began shortly after his article and continues to this day. Sales of Silver Eagles quickly doubled and tripled after his article and have never looked back. I do hope in his return that he intends to stick around for a spell.

This was Ted Butler's mid-week commentary to his paying subscribers yesterday...and it's already posted in the clear over at the goldsilverworlds.com Internet site...and I thank Taki Tsaklanos for sending it to me just minutes before I hit the 'send' button. Of course this is a must read...and the link is here.