Football fields, soccer fields...and the Statue of Liberty figure prominently in this most excellent graphic display which is an absolute must view.

I thank Peter Handley for sending this 'picture'. It's posted over at theinformedbroker.com website...and the link is here.

Reader Ken Metcalfe sent me this op-ed piece posted over at Bloomberg yesterday. I stole the above headline from the GATA release...but the Bloomberg headline to the story reads "Default Now, or Suffer a More Expensive Crisis Later: Ron Paul".

This is a longish read...but a must read for you sometime over the weekend...and the link is here.

High Frequency Traders are trying to spruce up their image a bit...

For years they have operated in the shadows, often far from Wall Street, trading stocks at warp speed and reaping billions while criticism rose that they were damaging markets and hurting ordinary investors.

After quietly growing to account for about 60 percent of the seven billion shares that change hands daily on United States stock markets, the firms are trying to stave off the regulators who are proposing to curb their activities.

Well, the SEC can start with JPMorgan's high frequency traders in the silver market.

This story was in Monday's edition of The New York Times. It's very much worth the read...and I thank Mike Smith for sharing it with us...and the link is here.

Here's a story that appeared in the on-line edition of The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

When the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation overhaul became law last July, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler raced to implement new rules assigned to the agency.

But as the landmark law nears its first anniversary on Thursday, Mr. Gensler's zeal has triggered a backlash.

Republicans in Congress have moved to cut the CFTC's budget, curb its power and request time-consuming analyses for every proposal. Some commissioners are irked by Mr. Gensler's aggressive approach. And crucial parts of the $600 trillion global market for derivatives, which many observers believe played a central role in the financial crisis, remain free of new regulations.

The story is subscriber protected, but is printed in the clear in this GATA release...and the link is here.

Here's another subscriber-protected story that appeared in Thursday's edition of The Wall Street Journal...this one about the secretive 'banker's bank'...the BIS. The WSJ headline reads "Where Buenos Aires Hides its Cash".

In December 2001 the Argentine state was finally served the bill for decades of economic Peronism. The government decided to default on a debt worth some $81 billion—the largest debt default in international monetary history. Now, 10 years later, international investors who lost significant sums still have no way of knowing whether they'll ever get their money back -- thanks in part to the Argentine government's unwitting accomplice, the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements.

I'd say this is a must read...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for bringing this story to my attention. The link to the GATA release is here.

Products get knocked off all the time -- designer bags, Oscar-night dresses, watches. But entire stores? That's something new. Which is why the Internet is going crazy over a blogger's report that three fake Apple stores have popped up in her neighborhood in Kunming, China.

In a post dated Wednesday on the blog BirdAbroad, the citizen reporter (an employee of an international public health organization) said she was initially duped by the quality of the fake Apple store. It had the iconic clean wood interior, the Apple branded posters on the walls, the employees with those tell-tale blue polo shirts and chunky name tags hanging around their necks. The store appeared to sell real Apple products.

Her husband bet it was a fake, she bet it wasn't. When they got home they looked online and found that Apple doesn't have any stores in Kunming. A few days later she walked down the street and bumped into two more Apple store knock-offs!

I bet you get a free 'ROLEX' watch with every 'Apple' computer! I thank reader Joseph Weiler for sending along this L.A. Times story from Wednesday...and the link is here.

This is a story that was sent to me a week ago, that just wouldn't fit in a regular weekly column, so here it is today.

Since Deng Xiaoping, China’s leaders have been obsessed with “food security” the same way America’s are haunted by not having enough oil. And as Chinese diets become more meat centric, fears of the dangers in the fluctuation of pork prices led China to establish a top-secret “strategic pork reserve” in 2007, the only one of its kind. But maintaining all those pigs has led to a massive dependence on corn and soybean imports for animal feed, which in turn is leading China’s agribusinesses to fan out abroad in a quest to control the means of production. China's attempts to control the means of production in other countries just rising out of developing world is causing tension with its natural allies, and could be just the first step in an ever-escalating series of resource-based conflicts.

This rather longish read posted over at fastcompany.com was sent to me by reader U.D. last Saturday...and the link is here.

Egypt has given the nod to plans for a gigantic bridge across the Red Sea. It would provide the first direct road link between Arab North Africa and the Middle East -- but the project could upset Israel and Jordan.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia hope to construct a giant bridge spanning the Gulf of Aqaba for road and rail traffic. Officials at Egypt's Ministry of Transportation have confirmed to SPIEGEL that the project, under discussion since 1988, has finally been approved.

The Gulf of Aqaba runs along the eastern edge of the Sinai Peninsula. Plans call for the 32-kilometer (20-mile) bridge to cross the narrow Strait of Tiran from Ras Nasrani, near the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, to Ras Hamid in northwestern Saudi Arabia. Parts of the bridge would be suspended.

I would suspect that Saudi Arabia is going to foot virtually the entire bill for this project.

This story was posted over at the German website spiegel.de on Monday...and didn't really fit with the rest of my weekday stories, so here it is in my Saturday column. I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along...and the link to this very interesting read, is here.

Banks will voluntarily agree to write down the value of their Greek securities by 21 percent as part of the bond exchange and debt buyback program, the Institute of International Finance said in a statement today. Europe’s 90 biggest banks hold about 98 billion euros of Greek debt, according to the European Banking Authority.

“Banks should be able to digest any haircuts on Greek debt, and it is already priced in to their shares,” said Andreas Plaesier, a Hamburg-based banking analyst at M.M. Warburg. “What was really key was supplying capital to Greek banks and stopping the possible chain reaction to lenders outside the country that hold Greek banking assets.”

Of course they can write it off. The money came out of thin air in the first place...and has now gone to money heaven. What the banks lose is the income stream from the money they created out of thin air. They'll make all of that back, plus more, during the subsequent bailouts.

This is another Roy Stephens offering...this one from Bloomberg yesterday. It's very much skimming...and the link is here.

Euro-zone leaders have acted, and a package of new aid for Greece has calmed financial markets. But Thursday's emergency summit raises new questions about the future of the euro -- and the structure of the euro zone itself.

Jürgen Matthes, at the Cologne Institute for Economic Research, says the danger still isn't over just because the ratings agencies have agreed to cooperate. "It can't be a guarantee that the financial markets reject," he said, adding that investors may yet react to Greece's short-term default with irrational speculation against other debt-ridden nations. "This could be playing with fire. It could still start a conflagration," he said.

They're kicking this problem can of theirs just a little further down the road. I thank Roy Stephens for sending me this story that was posted yesterday over at spiegel.de...and the link is here.

Thursday night’s eurozone bail-out was commonly described as a “last chance saloon”. This paper captured the mood succinctly by describing Thursday as the “Euro’s 11th hour”.

After yesterday morning’s brief euphoria, the cracks started to show and by tea time we had resumed the now familiar pattern of Italian and Spanish bond yields rising, while those in Germany and the UK were falling. Gold pushed through new highs.

Market reaction to the bail-out was predictably immediate, but Merkel & Co. are refusing to add any more detail to, say, the rules surrounding how the European financial stability facility will work. This is the key vehicle for stemming the contagion in Greece, Ireland and Portugal from spreading to Spain and Italy. Incredibly, that won’t happen until after the continent’s summer break. Angela Merkel won’t put the package to the German legislature until September.

Here's a really honest assessment of all this...and it's a posting from late last night in The Telegraph...and, once again, I must thank Roy Stephens for sharing it with us. It's not a long read, but it's a must read...and the link is here.

Here's another op-ed piece...this one from last Sunday's edition of The New York Times...and it's another commentary that's worth your while.

It is no wonder that young Greeks reacted so harshly when their deputy prime minister, Theodoros Pangalos, referring to all the European Union loans and subsidies that propelled the Greek credit binge after 1981, said, “We ate it together” — meaning the people and the politicians. That was true of the baby boomer generation of Greeks, now in their 50s and 60s, and the baby boomer politicians. But those just coming of age today will never get a bite. They will just get a bill. And they know it.

Reader Roy Stephens sent me this early last Sunday...and dovetails nicely with the previous three stories on the bailout of Greece et al, above...even though almost a week has past since it was written. I consider this story well worth your while...and the link is here.

If you remember from yesterday's column, I ran a Casey Daily Dispatch commentary on this very issue...and how it would affect mining in that country.

Hard on the heels of that, came this UPI story yesterday...also courtesy of Roy Stephens.

With a week to go before his inauguration Peruvian President-elect Ollanta Humala rushed through Cabinet appointments likely to reassure investors he wouldn't emulate Venezuelan peer Hugo Chavez when reforming the Latin American country's economy.

Peru is showing healthy growth but critics want more substantive changes to legislation and regulatory frameworks to embed the benefits of that growth. Peru's investor community and international partners also have hinted they want assurances Humala won't embark on state interventionism or extreme measures such as nationalization.

The story, filed from Lima, is well worth the read...and the link is here.

Here's an interesting gold-related story that popped up in Friday's edition of Casey's Daily Dispatch. BIG GOLD editor, Jeff Clark has written a piece about gold stocks...and their future prospects. Needless to say it's very positive...and well worth the read. You have to scroll down a bit to get to the story...and the link is here.

Silver has always been seen as less precious than gold, but it has certainly proved itself worthy of investors’ attention — and demand for it as a hedge against the world’s financial woes is likely to grow. Year to date, silver prices have gained about 26%. Gold’s 12% rise pales in comparison.

Silver is known as a “poor man’s gold,” so as gold prices rise and begin to price out many investors, “silver becomes a good and cheaper alternative,” said Mark Leibovit, chief market strategist at VRTrader.com.

This marketwatch.com story filed from San Francisco yesterday, was sent to me by reader Scott Pluschau. It's well worth your time...and the link is here.

Silver may more than double to $100 an ounce if the current bull market follows similar patterns seen between 1971 and 1980, according to technical analysis by Citigroup Global Markets Inc.

Needless to say, this article is a must read...and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for sharing it with us...and the link is here. The photo, which you must click to enlarge, is worth the trip all by itself.

If these are the summer doldrums for gold, mining entrepreneur Pierre Lassonde tells King World News, bring on the fall and the Indian wedding season. Mining shares are hugely undervalued, Lassonde says, and the coming mania in gold will be much greater than that of the 1970s because only Americans were buying gold then. Today gold is much more a worldwide phenomenon, according to Lassonde.

The audio interview is a must listen...and I thank Chris Powell for doing all the heavy lifting with the title and introduction. The link is here.