Jim Grant spends exactly the correct amount of time (zero) discussing the "urban myth' of the trillion dollar coin in this brief interview on CNBC; instead deciding to try and strike up some intelligent understanding of the dire situation we face. By providing context for our massive 16 trillion dollar debt (360 million pounds of $100 bills), and explaining how exponential the idiocy has become, Grant brings us full circle as he explains to the money-honey that once upon a time our debt was backed by gold, and "there was only so much gold and so many dollars," thus limiting our exuberance, but "now we have neither the gold covering the dollar nor do we have interest rates constraining us [thanks to Bernanke et al.]; the only thing remaining to constrain us is some sort of civil discussion, a numerate discussion about the debt," which it appears the bespectacled and bow-tie-bound bond brain-box hopes is possible.

"The debt has increased twice as fast as federal receipts," he warns, adding correctly that "the United States is truly submerging."

This must watch 7:09 minute video was embedded in a short cover story over at Zero Hedge...and I thank reader U.D. for sharing it with us. The link is here.

The infamous Troubled Assets Relief Program that bailed out Wall Street in 2008 – is over. The Treasury Department announced it will be completing the sale of the remaining shares it owns of the banks and of General Motors.

But in reality it’s not over. The biggest Wall Street banks are now far bigger than they were four years ago when they were considered too big to fail. The five largest have almost 44 percent of all US bank deposits.

That’s up from 37 percent in 2007, just before the crash. A decade ago they had just 28 percent.

The biggest banks keep getting bigger because they can borrow more cheaply than smaller banks. That’s because investors believe the government will bail them out if they get into trouble, rather than force them into a form of bankruptcy (as the new Dodd-Frank law makes possible).

That’s why it’s necessary to limit their size and break up the biggest.

This short, but absolute must read story was posted on the ukprogressive.co.uk Internet site on Wednesday...and I borrowed it from yesterday's edition of the King Report. The link is here.

A lot of people are wondering what to think about the news that the board of AIG is considering joining the lawsuit filed by former AIG head Maurice "Hank" Greenberg against the Fed and the U.S. government – a suit that one news outlet describes as charging the state with handing out an "insufficiently generous bailout."

The editorial in today's Daily News captures the public feeling over this confusing news story quite well, I think...

If chutzpah were a crime, Hank Greenberg, American International Group's former chief, would be going away for a long, long time.

Long since driven out of AIG, Greenberg is waging a lawsuit claiming the U.S. hurt the firm's shareholders — including him — when the government rescued the insurance giant with the most humongous bailout of all time.

Matt Taibbi goes ballistic over this...and takes quite a few words to rip Hank a new one, with a lot of those words being of the naughty variety. This "R" rated essay was posted over at the Rolling Stone magazine website on Wednesday...and I thank Roy Stephens for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who oversees stakes in some of the largest U.S. banks, said the nation’s lenders have rebuilt capital to the point where they no longer pose a threat to the economy.

“The banks will not get this country in trouble, I guarantee it,” Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said in a phone interview last week. “The capital ratios are huge, the excesses on the asset side have been largely cleared out.”

Lenders including Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. have sold assets, cut jobs and bolstered balance sheets after repaying taxpayer bailouts from 2008, when the companies were overwhelmed by losses on securities tied to the housing market. Those actions helped boost financial stocks last year and increased the value of Berkshire’s holdings.

Warren's father would disown him if he could see how badly his son had sold out to William Jennings Bryan's "Money Trusts". Warren is now a paid whore of the powers that be. It's been sad to watch him fall into the grasp of Mordor over the years. This Bloomberg story was posted on their website late yesterday afternoon...and I thank reader Paul Laviers for finding it for us. The link is here.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced new rules for mortgages at midnight Thursday.

The rules, which take effect in January of 2014, require lenders to consider a customer's ability to repay a loan before extending credit. They also provide a safe-harbor for lenders from borrower lawsuits claiming that a loan's terms were unfair.

If it strikes you as odd that a lender needs to be told by the government that it should consider the ability of its customers to repay a loan, you are not alone. I know some loans seem so stupid that it's hard to believe that whoever made it thought he'd be repaid. We just went through a financial crisis the proximate cause of which was, after all, lots of people not being able to pay their loans. But nearly all those loans were made under the (perhaps delusional) belief that they would be repaid one way or another.

Lenders want to be repaid. Even a lender that sells loans to investors or repackages them as securities needs to provide reassurance that a borrower can repay the loan. If you aren't planning on getting repaid, you aren't really a lender at all. You're a charity.

The story was posted on the CNBC Internet site late yesterday afternoon...and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for sending it along. The link is here.

Clinton was named the “Father of the Year” by the National Father’s Day Council on Wednesday.

The group selected Clinton for his “profound generosity, leadership and tireless dedication to both his public office and many philanthropic organizations,” Dan Orwig, chairman of the National Father’s Day Committee, said in the announcement.

The award will be presented at a luncheon in June.

WTF? Words fail me! For a moment I thought it was April Fool's Day...but it's only January 11th...even here in Canada. This blessedly short item from the politico.com Internet site yesterday is the second story in this column that I plucked from yesterday's King Report. The link is here.

The U.S. warnings on British exit from the EU are boilerplate American diplomacy. Washington has been saying these things ever since I started following the matters closely almost 25 years ago.

The Americans are correct in a narrow sense. British withdrawal would be a major blow to U.S. strategic interests. Washington relies on the EU to be broadly friendly, a pillar of global free trade, stable, and calm.

The White House does not want to be distracted by internecine European disputes as it switches its main focus to the Pacific Rim – the "Asian Pivot" – and deals with the really dangerous issue of China’s maritime conflict with Japan and South East Asia.

The U.K. is the crucial swing vote in the E.U. system, as I witnessed many times during my Brussels days.

Ambrose had been around the block a few times in his career before he began working at The Telegraph...and because of that, this blog of his from yesterday is also an absolute must read. It's Roy Stephens second offering in today's column...and the link is here.

On the campaign trail, Francois Hollande pleased working-class voters with promises of a super-tax on millionaires and sought to reassure foreign investors with commitments to restore public finances and revive French industry.

But now as he starts 2013 and his eighth month as president, the Socialist's clumsy handling of those promises has turned the public mood against him, created the impression among many entrepreneurs that he is anti-business and prompted smirking foreign leaders to offer refuge to French tax exiles.

Although Hollande and his parliamentary allies can look forward to a four-year run before facing re-election, those policy and PR gaffes risk hobbling him just as he embarks on what could be the decisive phase of his five-year mandate, with plans to set in motion long-talked-about labor, welfare and pension reforms in the euro zone's second-largest economy.

This longish Reuters essay was posted on the cnbc.com Internet site just before the markets closed in New York yesterday afternoon. I thank Elliot Simon for his second story in today's column...and the link is here.

he first is with Sprott Inc. President Kevin Bambrough...and it's headlined "Gold to Dwarf 1970s Move by Smashing Through $6,000". The second blog is with Egon von Greyerz. It's entitled "Swiss Gold Refiners Overwhelmed, Major Delays in Deliveries".

"Ever heard of SB3341?" is Rick Santelli's opening salvo in today's rant-less discussion of the concerns he has with Illinois' 'Precious Metal Purchasing Act'. While passed in the Illinois Senate last year, and moth-balled in the House since, Rick notes that "the long and short of it is, is they want an audit trail to any precious metals, whether you're talking coins or bullion."

This must watch 2:29 minute video is contained in a Zero Hedge piece from yesterday afternoon...and it's another offering from Elliot Simon. Rick Santelli even mentions GATA in passing...and the link is here.

Many hours before Rick Santelli and Zero Hedge picked up on this infamous bill, Washington state reader S.A. had slid a copy of it into my in-box early yesterday morning.

So if you want to 'read all about it'...it's posted on the ilga.gov Internet site...and the link is here.

Commenting on CNBC yesterday about legislation in bankrupt and murder-plagued Illinois to require registration of every gold transaction, Rick Santelli tossed out GATA's name as an aside, as if the organization is known to everyone who pays attention to the gold market.

Unfortunately Santelli did so by remarking that "GATA has a lot of conspiracy theories." We're glad of almost any recognition in the mainstream financial news media -- call us anything, just not late for dinner -- but rather than a "conspiracy theory" organization, GATA collects, analyzes, and publicizes public record of manipulation of the gold market, such as the records compiled in the documentation section of our Internet site.

The link to this GATA release that contains the link to the documentation section, is here.

Jim Sinclair tonight calls attention to a petition started at the White House Internet site calling upon the U.S. government to audit the U.S. gold reserve -- and to account for any surreptitious ownership claims to the gold.

The petition reads in part: "The gold bars need to be assayed and weighed. Once the gold is verified the paper trail must be audited to determine who really owns the gold; i.e., how much has been loaned to bankers and dealers and sold or swapped to non-Treasury entities including foreign governments. The audit must include professional auditors outside of the Mint, Treasury, GAO, Inspector General, and Federal Reserve system."

If 25,000 people electronically sign the petition, the White House is obliged to forward it to policy experts for review and to make a public statement about it.

The rest of this excellent GATA release is a must read as well...and the link is here.

Interviewed by Tekoa Da Silver at Bull Market Thinking, Doug Casey of Casey Research remarks that the shares of junior gold mining companies are now cheaper relative to gold itself than they have ever been. "So if somebody wants to participate in that highly volatile, very speculative space, now is the perfect time to do it," Casey says.

I found this must read interview embedded in a GATA release yesterday. It's posted at Bull Market Thinking's Internet site...and the link is here.