This week, finance industry journalist Matt Taibbi put together a list of five political demands Occupy Wall St. protestors could agitate for. First on his list was the breakup of the "too-big-to-fail" financial institutions holding the global economy hostage. In the following transcript from "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," Taibbi elaborates on how to break up the financial behemoths that sunk the economy.

This piece was posted over at Rolling Stone magazine last Friday...but this version is from the alternet.org website. I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along...and the link is here.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of the Italian capital to protest peacefully, but several dozen mask-wearing anarchists broke free from the main demonstration to rampage through the city.

Police fired tear gas and water cannons as rioters smashed shop and bank windows, set fire to cars and hurled bottles. Some protesters carried clubs, others wielded hammers. They destroyed bank cash machines, set bins on fire and assaulted at least two news crews from Sky Italia.

At least 70 protesters were injured and three were reported to be in critical condition. Twenty five of the injured were treated at a field clinic near St John Lateran square, where most of the clashes between protesters and police occurred, while the rest were taken to hospitals around the city. More than 30 policemen were hurt.

This story was posted in The Telegraph on Saturday afternoon...and is another Roy Stephens offering. The link is here.

Guido Westerwelle told the Bild am Sonntag weekly: "Let us not forget that the cause of the current crisis is too much debt in Europe, but also too much debt worldwide.

"Therefore, I cannot understand some of the critical comments from our American friends regarding our policy of reducing debt."

Westerwelle's remarks were the latest in a series of barbs between Berlin and Washington over Europe's perceived dithering over the crisis.

Like I said, the U.S. rating agencies...which the U.S. government is using as a weapon of mass destruction against Europe...will downgrade everything European until the cows come home...anything to keep the world's eyes off the economic, financial and monetary disaster that exists inside the USA. This story is from the Sunday Telegraph...and is Roy's third offering in row. The link is here.

Europe’s banks face a $7 trillion lending contraction to bring their balance sheets in line with the US and Japan, threatening to trap the region in a credit crunch and chronic depression for a decade.

The risk is "Japanisation" without the benefits of Japan: without a single government, or a trade super-surplus, or 1pc debt costs, or unique social cohesion.

Even today, the jobless rate for youth is near 10pc in Japan. It is already 46pc in Spain, 43pc in Greece, 32pc in Ireland, and 27pc in Italy. We will discover over time what yet more debt deleveraging will do to these societies.

Stephen Jen from SLJ Macro Partners says the loan to deposit (LTD) ratio of Europe’s lenders is 1.2, much like Japanese banks in the early 1990s at the onset of the country’s Lost Decade (now two decades).

I thank reader Neil Stansbury for sharing this story that was posted in The Telegraph on Sunday...and the link is here.

With the euro crisis going from bad to worse, it is looking increasingly likely that France may not be able to emerge unscathed. Indeed, leading German economists on Monday told the website of financial daily Handelsblatt that French debt is likely to be downgraded in the months to come.

"A new bailout package for debt-stricken countries in the southern part of the currency union will also strain French state finances," Jörg Krämer, chief economist for the German banking giant Commerzbank, told the website. "In the coming year, the country could lose its top AAA rating."

Thorsten Polleit, chief economist of Barclays Capital Deutschland, agrees. "The problems of their domestic banks could result in significant additional pressure for the financial situation of the French state," he told the Handelsblatt website.

This story was posted over at the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and is Roy's fourth contribution to this column. The link is here.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters demonstrated in hundreds of cities around the world on Saturday against banks and the global financial system. In Germany, the main marches took place in Berlin and the country's financial center, Frankfurt. Demonstrators mounted protests in around 50 German cities, with total participation of more than 40,000 people according to Attac, one of the events' organizers.

Taking their cue from the "Occupy Wall Street" movement in the United States, they took to the streets with their "We are the 99 percent" message to draw attention to the negative effects of a financial and economic crisis that has driven millions of people into poverty and was triggered by severe excesses by the world's banks and financial system.

In a rare development, the protests drew widespread support from politicians in Germany and Europe, who are currently wrestling with banks to increase the participation of private creditors in the debt bailout currently being planned for Greece. The same politicians are frustrated by their inability in recent years to push through tougher regulations for financial institutions.

This is another story posted over at spiegel.de yesterday...and is another Roy Stephens offering. This one is certainly worth the read...and the link is here.

Big snag. If Europe’s leaders do indeed leverage their €440bn bail-out fund (EFSF) to €2 trillion or €3 trillion through some form of "first loss" insurance on Club Med bonds – as markets now seem to assume – the consequences will be swift and brutal.

Professor Ansgar Belke, from Berlin's DIW Institute, said any leveraging of the EFSF would be "poisonous" for France’s AAA rating and would set off an uncontrollable chain of events.

"It counteracts all efforts made so far to stabilize the eurozone debt crisis, which are premised on the AAA rating of a sufficiently large number of strong economies. In extremis, it would probably cause the break-up of the eurozone", he told Handlesblatt.

This is an Ambrose Evans-Pritchard offering from The Telegraph yesterday and, once again, I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along. The link is here.

The Japanese government downgraded its assessment of the economy for the first time in six months, saying weakening global growth is slowing down a recovery in factory output and exports.

The assessment for October, published today, reflects growing concern that the economy's rebound from the March earthquake and tsunami could be tailing off because of faltering overseas demand and deteriorating market sentiment.

"The Japanese economy is still picking up although the pace of recovery decelerates, while difficulties continue to prevail due to the earthquake," the government said in its report.

The comment was similar to the assessment in its previous monthly report, except this time it has added that the pace of recovery was decelerating.

This is a story that was posted in The Telegraph yesterday afternoon...and I thank Roy Stephens once again for sharing it with us. The link is here.

Geopolitical analyst James G. Rickards told King World News yesterday that the U.S. government policy of financial repression will force major banks to stop trading for their own accounts and buy mostly U.S. government bonds at negative real interest rates, engineering long-term inflation of 5 percent per year to devalue the dollar by half over 15 years. Meanwhile, Rickards says, governments around the world will buy gold stealthily, pushing the price up, but also cautiously, lest their buying push the price up too fast.

I thank Chris Powell for wordsmithing the introduction...and the link to this must read KWN interview is here.

Hong Kong's Chinese Gold & Silver Exchange Society, a century-old bullion bourse, started trading gold quoted in yuan, boosting the city’s status as an offshore hub for the currency.

The contract may generate as much as HK$6 billion ($770 million) in trades a day, exchange President Haywood Cheung said in an Oct. 14 interview. Daily bullion trading volume at the society, which has 171 active members, has jumped to HK$136 billion this year from last year’s HK$31 billion on appetite for gold as a haven from stock declines, he said.

“There’s triple demand for this yuan product,” said Cheung. “Investors can enjoy the bull market in gold, the yuan’s appreciation and hedge gold denominated in other currencies against the yuan.”

This very important Bloomberg story from yesterday was filed from Hong Kong...and I thank reader Scott Pluschau for sharing it with us. The link is here. There's a similar, but quite different story on this, posted over at the financeasia.com website...and it's worth a look as well. The link to that story, which I stole from a GATA release, is here.

The river runs red in Rosia Montana. The rouge-coloured run-off of zinc, iron, arsenic and other sulphides from nearly 2,000 years of gold mining make the waterway in Romania’s Transylvanian mountains live up to the area’s name, which means red mountain in Romanian.

If not deadly, a mouthful or two would certainly not be a good idea but the clean-up plan for this waterway has become a focal point of an epic planning battle over the future of the largest gold mine in Europe.

The mine, first exploited by the Romans in 131AD, has a reserve of 10m ounces of gold, putting it in the top 10 of worldwide undeveloped gold assets.

Even with the recent drop in the gold price to $1,680 an ounce, that makes its potential highly lucrative, with an estimated production cost of $350 per ounce.

This story was posted in The Telegraph late last night...and is Roy Stephens last offering of the day. The link is here.

A Canadian mining company and a tiny South Carolina town are leading what could be a modern gold rush to the southeastern United States.

Romarco Minerals Inc. reopened the historic Haile Gold Mine near Kershaw, S.C., this year and expects to pour its first gold bar there in early 2014, Chief Executive Diane Garrett told Reuters this week.

Once environmental impact studies and permits are complete, Haile will be the only modern gold mine east of the Mississippi River, Garrett said, and the first since the Kennecott Minerals mine closed in Ridgeway, S.C., in 1999.

Based on the proven gold reserves found in samples, the Toronto company estimates it has 3.1 million ounces of gold at Haile. The mine will produce an average of 150,000 ounces of gold a year for five years, according to its website.

This Reuters piece was filed from Charleston on Saturday...and I thank Olive Branch, Mississippi reader Chuck Demastus for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

Eric King of King World News fame sent me this Greg Weldon blog from Saturday...and the link is here.

Rising gold prices may not have severely affected the yellow metal's attractiveness for Indian households but it is slowly altering consumer behavior.

The share of gold medallions in the bullion market is rising fast as a new set of investors interested in buying gold coins and bars has emerged. While the demand for the yellow metal continues to rise, albeit at a slower pace, retailers say there is a growing segment of consumers who now value utility besides aesthetics, although the housewives still prefer to hoard jewellery.

Most jewellery brands say that consumers are increasingly investing in gold medallions as they are cheaper to buy compared to a necklace or bangles. So much so that the demand for gold coins and bars has trebled as compared to the same period last year.

This story, filed from New Delhi, was posted over at the indiatimes.com website yesterday...and I thank reader Avi Raheja for sending it along. The link is here.

Here's another KWN blog that Eric sent me yesterday afternoon. I found it very interesting reading...and I suggest you run through it if you have the time. It's not overly long...and the graphs are of interest. The link is here.

Eric Sprott, one of the most vocal critics of the global financial system, wants to start a bank. But it won’t be like any bank most people are used to seeing.

Mr. Sprott and the asset management firm he founded, Sprott Inc., are investing in an Ontario-based currency trading company known as Continental Currency Exchange Corp. They, along with the current management of Continental, are applying to federal regulators for permission to turn the 17-branch operation into the Continental Bank of Canada. They expect to get a decision early next year.

The bank Mr. Sprott and his partners envisage would seek to address all the things that Mr. Sprott has warned against in the global financial system, such as too much leverage and a lack of confidence in paper currency.

Continental Bank would take deposits, but it would make no loans, unlike most current banks that are built on a model of lending out far more money than they actually have on hand.

This story was posted in Canada's Globe and Mail yesterday...and is a must read in my opinion...and the link is here.

Yesterday, King World News interviewed GoldMoney founder and GATA consultant James Turk, who remarked that the worsening insolvency of banks around the world will support the prices of the precious metals, as only the precious metals are without counterparty risk.

I stole the above preamble from a GATA release...and the link to the KWN blog is here.

Michael Kosares, proprietor of Centennial Precious Metals in Denver, noted last night that if the inflation figures used by Shadow Government Statistics -- inflation figures calculated in the old way -- are followed, the "Misery Index" under President Obama is 50 percent worse than it was under President Carter. That "Misery Index," Kosares writes, is driving gold demand, and his commentary can be found posted over at the USAGold.

I consider this a must read...and the link is here.