Washington state reader also provides our first reading material of the day...and it's a Bloomberg article from yesterday.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets, was subpoenaed by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for information on the firm’s activities leading into the credit crisis, two people familiar with the matter said.

The subpoena relates to the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on Wall Street’s role in the collapse of the financial markets, which accused New York- based Goldman Sachs of misleading buyers of mortgage-linked investments, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the inquiry isn’t public.

The link is here.

Goldman invested $1.5 billion for the Libyan sovereign wealth fund in 2008, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. It lost 98 percent of the money.

In an effort to placate outraged Libyan officials, Goldman executives attempted to sell preferred shares of the firm to Libya.

And this is where the feeling of relief comes in.

“The last thing we need right now would be headlines reading ‘Vampire Squid Profits Funding Libyan Dictator,’” one senior Goldman investment banker told NetNet. [We agreed not to identify him, because bankers are not really supposed to talk to reporters, except under very limited and controlled circumstances.]

The United States has been bombing Libya for months—and Gadaffi is back on the list of official villains.

I'll bet you a fair amount of coin that Rolling Stone magazine's Matt Taibbi must have laughed hysterically when he read this piece...and you should too. I thank Roy Stephens for this cnbc.com story...and the link to this must read story is here.

Here's a FT story that showed up posted over at imarketnews.com. I stole it from yesterday's King Report.

European Central Bank Executive Board member Lorenzo Bini Smaghi said that "prices of food and energy commodities can be expected to increase at a rate greater than that of manufactured goods and services."

As a result, "headline inflation will tend to be significantly higher than core inflation, both in advanced and emerging countries," he said.

Bill King's comment on this story was as follows..."Core inflation was only useful to obfuscate real inflation, which is why it was conceived and created." He has that exactly right...and the link to this short read is here.

Greek officials slammed Moody's latest decision to push its rating lower into junk territory, saying it does not take into account the government's efforts to cut the debt.

Privately, European officials and analysts have been complaining that the bulk of the main rating agencies – two out of three – are based in the US and not always objective when it comes to rating European countries.

In Asia and Europe, officials are looking for solutions.

I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for this story...and the link is here.

Thousands fled Sana'a Thursday as tribesmen and loyalist troops battled for the third day running. Witnesses say the fighting was the fiercest so far after loyalist forces who had received US training as part of its "war on terror" joined the battle.

This very short story was posted over at france24.com yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along. The link is here.

A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone — has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill.

Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive solution: Divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people.

I thank reader John Sanders for sharing this must read story from the June 1st edition of The New York Times...and the link is here.

The Pampas are just as the old geography textbooks described them: vast flat plains stretching to distant horizons, white heads of tall grasses catching the autumn light. A great empty road ploughs a furrow from Buenos Aires through mile upon mile of fertile lands towards the ports on the great South American waterway, the Paraná river.

But missing from much of the Pampas now are the Argentinean beef cattle that used to be synonymous with this region that makes up one of the world's most expansive grazing lands.

The way-markers today are grain silos, agricultural hangars for harvesting machines, and banner adverts across nearly every field for agrochemicals and genetically modified soya seed.

This is another Roy Stephens offering...and it's an article out of the June 1st edition of The Guardian. The link is here.

Wall Street is tapping a real gusher in 2011, as heightened volatility and higher prices of oil and other raw materials boost banks' profits.

A group of 10 large banks—including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Bank of America and Barclays PLC—saw their commodities revenues increase by 55% in the first quarter, according to Coalition, a firm that analyzes the performance of investment banks. After a disappointing 2010, commodities was the fastest-growing segment in banks' fixed-income businesses in the first three months of this year, even though it still accounts for just 7% of banks' total fixed-income revenues, Coalition said.

Commodities trading is a bright spot for institutions that face new regulatory clampdowns on practices that previously fattened bank profit margins, such as trading with their own capital and slapping customers with hefty "overdraft" fees.

This is a story out of yesterday's edition of The Wall Street Journal...and it's courtesy of reader James Akers...and the link is here.

An outspoken U.S. senator who criticized the country's futures regulator for failing to crackdown on energy speculation said on Thursday he will introduce legislation next week that will force the agency to act.

Senator Bernie Sanders said the legislation would force the head of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to use emergency authority to impose limits on the positions investors can take in crude oil, gasoline and heating oil. The move could occur without support from the majority of the agency's commissioners.

This Reuters piece ended up as a GATA release yesterday...and the link is here.

In August 2006, Ted Butler observed the London Metal Exchange default (excerpts below). As we get closer to the inevitable fall of the Crimex, it seems proper to recall how the nickel default of 2006 went down.

The investment world witnessed an event that has only occurred rarely in the past. I am referring to the extraordinary developments in the nickel market on the London Metals Exchange (LME), the largest base metals exchange in the world. Due to an unprecedented scarcity of metal, the LME was forced to revise the delivery terms of its nickel contracts.

Default is a simple word. Any time you unilaterally violate or negate the terms and conditions of any legal contract, that contract is in default. Period.

Moreover, a simple analysis of the situation reveals that the LME is aligning itself with the interests of the naked shorts in nickel, as common sense should tell you that no long holder asked the exchange to suspend the delivery obligation of the shorts.

This is a must read article...as is silver analyst Ted Butler's original 2006 essay entitled "First Nickel, Then Silver". I thank reader 'David in California' for sharing this with us...and the link to both is here.

A couple of days ago I posted a King World News blog with James Turk. Eric sent me the entire audio interview last night...and the link is here.

On the 'Letters' page of The Economist last week, Nils Sandberg from Cambridge University’s Judge Business School presented a common argument against gold’s current value.

It's hard to believe that such ignorance exists...but it's in this story for all to see. One has to wonder how long it takes him to tie his shoelaces in the morning.

However, the founder & CEO of BullionVault, Paul Tustain, tees Mr. Sandberg up and drives him down the fairway with his rebuttal. This article, posted at politicalmetals.com, is worth the read...and I thank reader Tariq Khan for sending it to me. The link is here.

Here's a blog that Eric sent me late last night as a companion piece to the Turk interview. Eric headlines the piece "Embry - Silver's Drop is JP Morgan Trying to Protect Their Ass". It's a short read...and the link is here.

With sales of no less than 3.65 million ounces of new American Eagle silver coins in May, silver coin sales by the U.S. Mint are reported to be at their highest ever from U.S. Mint data going back to 1986. Indeed May sales were even 30% higher than April's 2.819 million ounces, which in itself was the best ever April on record. This brings the total sale of American Eagle silver coins to 18.9 million ounces so far this year. Last year's sales over the same period amounted to 15.2 million ounces.

This is a short piece posted over at the mineweb.com yesterday...and it's courtesy of reader George Findlay. The link is here.

Lastly today comes this piece about silver by Casey Research's own Jeff Clark. Jeff is editor of the CR publication BIG GOLD. This appeared in yesterday's edition of Casey's Daily Dispatch and is well worth your time.

CPM Group recently released their 2011 Silver Yearbook, one of the industry’s most comprehensive sources of information on the silver market. Though mostly a reference book, I uncovered some interesting facts that paint a decidedly bullish picture for the metal going forward.

If you’re a silver investor, or are concerned about the recent selloff, you may find the following data very compelling. It provides an inside track on the market and will certainly make us all more knowledgeable investors.

The link is here...and you have to scroll down a bit to get to it.