Famed fund manager Mark Mobius, one of the pioneers of emerging-market investing and a staunch advocate for the frontier markets, has made some noise with a simple statement of fact: “There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner because we haven’t solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis,” Mr. Mobius told a lunch gathering of foreign journalists in Tokyo.

The main culprit will again be derivatives, whose effective regulation has been repeatedly stymied by the major financial houses. They make a heck of a lot more money designing and peddling these financial tools when the clients can’t quite figure out their true market value or the risks they entail.

This story was posted late yesterday afternoon in Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper...and I thank reader George Findlay for sending it along. The link to this very short story is here.

Enda Kenny said Ireland did not need to top up the €85bn (£74bn) rescue package provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Union in 2010. "The bail-out programme runs to the end of 2013 and Ireland has sufficient money in all circumstances to deal with that."

Mr. Kenny's comments come after Ireland's transport minister, Leo Varadkar, said Ireland would probably be forced to go cap-in-hand to the EU and IMF for an additional loan before 2013.

I would guess that this is a classic example of Mr. Kenny whistling past the graveyard. This is a Roy Stephens offering from yesterday's edition of The Telegraph...and the link is here.

This story was posted in The Sydney Morning Herald earlier today and was sent to me by Australian reader Wesley Legrand.

Germany has become the first big industrialised power to agree on an end to nuclear power following the disaster in Japan, with a phase-out due to be completed by 2022.

The Environment Minister, Norbert Roettgen, announced the decision yesterday by the centre-right coalition, which was prompted by the crisis at Japan's Fukushima plant, calling it ''irreversible''.

The year 2022 is a long way off...and a lot can change between now and then. We'll see if this decision withstands the test of time...and economic reality. The link is here.

The cold war between Berlin and Frankfurt reached a new high last week.

What's best for Greece and Europe -- a soft debt restructuring or billions of euros in loans for years to come? Berlin and the ECB are deeply divided over the best way to handle the crisis. A number of influential Germans fear the threat of austerity measures could be greater than a "haircut" of Greek debt.

This longish story, posted on the German website spiegel.de yesterday, is courtesy of Roy Stephens...and the link is here.

No! Really? Ya figure? Here's a man with a keen grasp of the obvious.

Many in Europe assume that Greece will ultimately have to default on a portion of its debt. In an interview with SPIEGEL, European Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn, however, insists that debt restructuring is not on the agenda. He also discusses reports that Athens is considering a return to the drachma.

This is another Roy Stephens offering...and the link is here.

More than 100 military officials and soldiers have defected from Libya's armed forces in recent days, according to a group of eight military officers, as pressure mounts on leader Muammar Gaddafi to step down.

The high-ranking Libyan army officers appeared at a press conference in Italy on Monday, where they announced that they were part of a group of as many as 120 military officials and soldiers who defected from Gaddafi's side in recent days.

This story was posted over at aljazeera.com in the wee hours of this morning...and it's an interesting read in the fact that it's as far away from the U.S. media spin machine as you can get. Once again I thank Roy Stephens for this story...and the link is here.

More than half of China's trade, or about $2 trillion, is expected to be settled in yuan by 2015, according to Montgomery Ho, head of commercial banking at HSBC China.

Businesses said the major obstacle to switching to settling in yuan is its acceptability outside of China. Overseas firms find it difficult to secure yuan to pay for goods and have too few channels to use the yuan they receive as payment, the survey found. A lack of support from banks and knowledge about the yuan also pose problems.

This story, posted over at marketwatch.com, is courtesy of reader George Findlay...and the link is here.

Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden comments sardonically today about China's efforts to diversify its foreign currency reserves. His conclusion:

"Slowly China is realizing the joy of an interlinked fiat world: At best it can rotate out of one insolvent regime into another. The bottom line is that all regimes are insolvent. So the only question is whether, or rather when, just like back in April 2009, when China dropped the bomb that over the past six years it had accumulated secretly 454 tons of gold, China will announce that while it has been rotating in and out of paper, the ultimate source of its $3 trillion in U.S. dollar reserves will be non-dilutable commodities, which handily double up as currencies."

I stole this story from a GATA release yesterday...and the link is here.

Bull markets do not move in a straight line, nor do the price of gold and silver. Their price advances, and then retreats to ‘correct’ the previous advance. For the past four weeks, gold and silver have been going through one of these periodic price corrections.

This is a piece that just appeared over at Free Gold Money Report. I don't necessarily agree with everything in here...as I consider what happened to the silver price to be a deliberate act...and I consider JPMorgan et al most excellent at painting any T.A. pattern they wish to do, as they just did in silver.

Anyhow, now that the bottom is in, I agree with all the "bullish divergences" that is talked about further down in the article. It's worth the read...and the link is here.

Here's a short blog posted over at King World News from the 'R' Man himself that Eric King slid into my in-box late last night...and the link is here. The graph itself is worth the trip.

For gold miners, success has been anything but fun lately.

Everything these companies prayed for a decade ago, they got. Collapsing global currencies. A gold pricing rising from US$250 an ounce to more than US$1,500. Incredible earnings and cash flow growth. It played out exactly as the gold bugs said it would, and then some.

Yet you won’t find many gold CEOs with smiles on their faces these days, because over the last 12 to 18 months, their share prices have barely responded to the accelerating gold price.

This is a story out of Canada's Financial Post last week...and I thank reader Howard Brown for sending it along. The link is here.

Here's a GATA release that contains four gold-related stories...all of which suggest that the long-term trend for gold remains favourable. The link to the GATA release is here.

The information about the appearance of imitation gold bars filled with tungsten on the market has turned out to be good news because it has helped curb inflation.

Several days ago Vietnamese people got startled at the information that imitation gold has appeared on the market.

Goldsmith shop owners received offers to sell bullion gold from some dealers from Hong Kong. However, when they cut the gold bar samples, they found that the bars contained only 60-75 percent of gold and had some sediment like fine sand particles, which they thought wolfram.

This vietnamnet.vn story was posted in a GATA release yesterday...and the link to this worthwhile read is here.

Here's another item that I stole from a GATA release in the wee hours of this morning.

Egon von Greyerz, managing partner of Matterhorn Asset Management in Zurich, whose market commentaries often have been cited in GATA dispatches, has been interviewed by GoldMoney's James Turk about the prospects for gold. Von Greyerz notes that all currencies long have been declining against gold and that gold is returning to its role as a reserve currency, but he cautions that investors must hold real metal, not paper, and make sure that it is vaulted outside the banking system. The interview is 28 minutes long...and the link is here.