My first two stories of the day are courtesy of reader Scott Pluschau. The first is a Bloomberg piece from yesterday.

The percentage of working-age Californians with jobs has fallen to a record low, and employment may not return to pre-recession levels until the second half of the decade, according to a research group.

Just 55.4 percent of working-age Californians, defined as those 16 or older, had a job in July, down from 56.2 percent a year earlier and the lowest level since 1976, the Sacramento- based California Budget Project said in a report released late yesterday.

The link is here.

The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances.

“Our situation is extremely serious,” the postmaster general, Patrick R. Donahoe, said in an interview. “If Congress doesn’t act, we will default.”

Scott's second offering comes from yesterday's edition of The New York Times...and the link is here.

If its secret isn’t oil, what is so unique about the state? North Dakota has one thing that no other state has: its own state-owned bank.

Access to credit is the enabling factor that has fostered both a boom in oil and record profits from agriculture in North Dakota. The Bank of North Dakota does not compete with local banks but partners with them, helping with capital and liquidity requirements. It participates in loans, provides guarantees, and acts as a sort of mini-Fed for the state.

This very interesting story showed up posted at the alternet.org website yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for his first of many stories today. The link is here.

That, at least, was the message offered by Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann on Monday in comments delivered at a conference in Frankfurt. "We should resign ourselves to the fact that the 'new normality' is characterized by volatility and uncertainty," Ackermann said. "All this reminds one of the autumn of 2008."

The volatility was on full display on Monday as the leading German market index, the DAX, plunged to a two-year low and stocks of European banks, including Ackermann's Deutsche Bank, lost value. The price of gold once again spiked upwards as investors sought security.

In addition, the European Central Bank reported that European banks on Friday parked €151 billion ($213.3 billion) overnight with the ECB, the highest total in more than a year. The increase reflects growing distrust on the financial markets, with banks shunning the higher interest rates they would earn by depositing money with each other.

This short article...Roy Stephens second offering of the day...was posted over at the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and the link is here.

European shares tumbled to their lowest close in more than two weeks overnight amid renewed recession and eurozone debt worries and threats to the banking sector.

Britain's FTSE 100 ended the day 3.6 per cent lower, while Germany's DAX fell 5.3 per cent and France's CAC40 dropped 4.7 per cent.

The STOXX Europe 600 Banks index fell 5.9 per cent and hit a 29-month low. It has lost more than one-third of its value in 2011, and is the worst performing European sector. Deutsche Bank fell 8.9 per cent, extending a decline from Friday, when news of the lawsuit first hit shares in the sector.

Reader Rob Bentley sent me this news item that was posted over at abc.net.au in Australia late yesterday. It's a very short must read story...and the link is here.

You can feel the storm brewing in Germany. Within days of each other, President Christian Wulff accused the European Central Bank of going "far beyond" its mandate and subverting Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty by shoring up insolvent states, and Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann said bail-out policies had "completely gutted" the EU law.

Both believe the EU Project has taken a dangerous turn. Fiscal powers are slipping away to a supra-national body beyond sovereign control. "This strikes at the very core of our democracies. Decisions have to be made in parliament in a liberal democracy. That is where legitimacy lies," said Mr. Wulff.

Otmar Issing, the ECB’s founding guru, fears that the current course must ultimately provoke the "resistance of the people". Instead of evolving into an authentic union with a "European government controlled by a European Parliament" on democratic principles, it has become deformed halfway house.

This Ambrose Evans-Pritchard offering from yesterday's edition of The Telegraph was sent to me by reader Martin Arnest...and is well worth your time. The link is here.

On Thursday of last week, Greece’s finance minister Evangelos Venizelos rejected a report that suggested the country would likely miss budget targets, saying the body that issued the damning report lacked experience and responsibility.

The Greek finance ministry backpedalled on Thursday after a new budget watchdog released an internal report warning that debt was "out of control" just as officials held critical talks with creditors.

This AFP story was posted over at the france24.com website late last week...and I thank Roy Stephens once again. The link is here.

The International Monetary Fund has called on the US and Europe to abandon fiscal austerity and switch to stimulus measures, warning that the global economy faces a "threatening downward spiral".

"There has been a clear crisis of confidence that has seriously aggravated the situation. Measures need to be taken to ensure that this vicious circle is broken," she said.

The comments come at the start of a dramatic week for the eurozone as Italy prepares to roll over record sums of debt and Germany's constitutional court (left) issues its long-awaited verdict on the legality of the EU's bail-out machinery.

Markets are already tense after the EU-IMF 'Troika' withdrew abruptly from Athens on Friday, accusing the Greek government of failing to comply with rescue terms.

This story was in the Monday edition of The Telegraph...and I thank reader David Ball for sending it along. It's another story that deserves skimming if you have the time...and the link is here.

Here's a long interview with our very own Doug Casey. It was posted over at The Daily Bell on Sunday. When you give Doug this much time, he lets it all hang out.

It's a must read from one end to the other...and I thank reader Carl Lindors for bringing it to my attention. The link is here.

Copper will remain in short supply for a third straight year in 2012 as China-led demand boosts prices, Japan’s top producer said.

Demand will likely exceed supply by 495,000 metric tons in 2011, the biggest deficit since 2004, compared with 214,000 tons last year, said Akira Miura, executive officer of the marketing and raw-material department at Pan Pacific Copper Co., Japan’s biggest producer. The shortage may shrink to 31,000 tons in 2012, he said.

The story was posted over at Bloomberg on Monday...and I thank reader U.D. for sharing it with us. The link is here.

Gold prices have soared by 32pc this year, as investors sought a safe haven from the global debt crisis. However, some argue that gold is in a bubble fuelled more by speculation than the fundamentals of supply and demand. In contrast, platinum prices have risen by just 5pc so far this year – and supply remains very tight indeed.

This is another Roy Stephens offering that he dug up over at The Telegraph on Monday...and the link is here.

An interesting article at Zero Hedge today, which has a story about Bob Pisani's visit to the GLD vault. The thrust of the story is that the Rand Refineries bar with serial number ZJ6752 does not appear in the GLD bar list. Our database has records from June 20th...and I can confirm that the bar doesn't appear in the last 45 published documents.

We're happy to announce that we found the bar, but just not in the GLD data. The bar currently belongs to ETF Securities.

This very short, but fabulous story, was posted over at the screwtapefiles.com website on September 1st. The reader who sent me this story wishes to remain anonymous...and I will respect his wishes. But this short item is a must read...and the link is here.

The first time I met Hugo, I ran into him and his lovely wife Esther, on a street in downtown London before the conference started...and what a warm and wonderful man he is. We got along fabulously...and his talk later in the week was very well received by all present.

His speech, amongst other things, is posted in this GATA release...and I'll let Chris Powell do the honours. The link is here.

Interviewed yesterday by King World News, GoldMoney founder and GATA consultant James Turk notes that gold is plainly separating itself from other asset classes, rising as they fall, becoming recognized as the primary safe haven, the asset without counterparty risk -- at least for those who have real gold and not merely the Western fractional-reserve gold banking system's paper receipts.

This blog is a must read...and I thank Chris Powell for the preamble...and the link is here.

It is not uncommon for the XAU Index to underperform gold from time to time, which is clear from the above chart. But just like night follows day, relative valuations and performance turn when they reach an extreme. We appear to be at one of those turning points for gold and the XAU Index.

I expect gold to continue climbing higher. That is after all, its primary trend. But look for the price of the mining stocks to start climbing even more rapidly than gold.

This is another must read story...and is posted over at the Free Gold Money Report website and authored by James Turk. The graph is worth the trip all by itself...and the link to this very short read, is here.

This, and the story below, were the big news events over the weekend. Thankfully, Chris Powell has done all the heavy lifting on this one...and here's a snippet...

"China knows that the U.S. government and its allies in Western Europe strive to suppress the price of gold, and the U.S. government knows that China knows, according to a 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to the State Department in Washington."

"The cable, published in the latest batch of U.S. State Department cables obtained by Wikileaks, summarizes several commentaries in Chinese news media on April 28, 2009. One of those commentaries is attributed to the Chinese newspaper Shijie Xinwenbao (World News Journal), published by the Chinese government's foreign radio service, China Radio International."

And it just gets better. There's enough reading in this GATA release to keep you busy for quite some time, as Chris as posted lots of links, including the Beijing embassy cable in question.

Needless to say this is a must read from beginning to end...and the link is here.

The China Gold story just gets more incredible with each passing day. You just can't make this stuff up.

More news media-monitoring cables from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to the State Department in Washington show that both China's government and the nation's financial press, tightly controlled by the government, consider gold to be the main weapon in a world currency war that is under way.

The additional cables, published a few days ago by Wikileaks and located by GATA's Irish friend R.M., disclose that China thinks that the United States is trying to prevent China's foreign exchange surplus from being converted into gold because the U.S. and its European allies plan a return to a gold standard that will favor them because they hold most of the world's gold reserves.

I stole part of Chris Powell's introduction to this story...and the rest of the GATA release is linked here. It's another must read from one end to the other.