The U.S. citizenship ceremony is an iconic rite of passage for immigrants.

Would-be Americans gather to pledge allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. There are cheers and often tears, patriotic speeches, sometimes music, and plenty of flag waving.

Now, a small but growing band of Americans in Canada is doing it in reverse – gathering en masse to begin the process of becoming un-American.

It was a sombre affaire at the U.S. consulate in Toronto last month as 22 Americans waited in the rain before being ushered in to what is believed to be the first citizenship renunciation meeting ever held in Canada.

Unlike most countries, the United States requires its citizens to file annual tax returns with its Internal Revenue Service regardless of where they live and work. Many of the roughly one million Canadian-American citizens long ago stopped filing, assuming they owed no tax. Many are worried now they’ll be hit with punishing penalties as a result of recent U.S. efforts to prevent its citizens from hiding assets in offshore tax havens.

This is a must read for any expat American...or about-to-be expat American. I thank reader Richard Murphy for sending me this story out of Tuesday's edition of The Globe and Mail...and the link is here.

Fannie Mae, the biggest source of money for U.S. home loans, on Tuesday said it needed a further $7.8 billion in federal aid to stay afloat as a shaky housing market widened its third-quarter loss to $5.1 billion.

The government-controlled firm also attributed the deeper cash drain to losses on derivatives used to hedge its exposure to interest-rate swings and on expenses related to home loans made prior to the 2008 financial collapse. In the year-earlier quarter it had a loss of a $1.3 billion.

Fannie Mae has now drawn $112.6 billion in bailout funds from the Treasury Department since being seized by the government in 2008 as mortgage losses mounted, and it has returned $17.2 billion to taxpayers in the form of dividends.

Wow! You can't make this stuff up. I thank reader Scott Pluschau for sending me this Reuters story from yesterday...and the link is here.

Jefferson County, Alabama filed the biggest U.S. municipal bankruptcy after an agreement among elected officials and investors to refinance $3.1 billion in sewer bonds fell apart.

The county, home to Birmingham, the state’s most-populous city, listed assets and debt of more than $1 billion in Chapter 9 papers filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Birmingham.

The county’s bankruptcy attorney, Kenneth Klee, said the filing was necessary because talks with creditors and the receiver in charge of the sewer system built by the bonds broke down.

“There was an impasse reached,” Klee said in an interview today. “None of the creditors -- zero -- signed up to the deal that we have been negotiating for six weeks.”

This Bloomberg story is Scott Pluschau's second offering in today's column...and the link is here.

MF Global is still missing an estimated $600 million more than a week after it filed for bankruptcy, and at least one high-profile accounting expert said Wednesday he is beginning to sense fraud may be the explanation.

"My concern is that at the very end as things got very dire, as liquidity dried up, that you had some people in collusion go in and commit fraud here and I don't know that that did occur, but that's what it's starting to smell like," Lynn Turner, former chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission told Bloomberg Television Wednesday.

A spokesman for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, one of MF Global's regulators, declined to comment, as did an MF Global spokesman. A call to MF Global's bankruptcy trustee was not returned.

This story, filed over at thestreet.com website yesterday, is reader Scot Pluschau's third and final offering of the day...and I thank him. The link is here.

Even though they are first in line to be paid back under broker liquidation rules, customers of bankrupt MF Global Holdings Ltd's brokerage may not get all their money back.

A federal statute designed to protect customers of failed brokerages may not be able to save MF Global's commodities customers if a court-appointed trustee cannot locate about $600 million in missing customer money.

A key reason: an insurance fund designed to help customers of failed brokerages generally does not apply to commodities customers, said Stephen Harbeck, the fund's chief executive.

Of the roughly 50,000 MF Global accounts totaling at least $5.45 billion, only about 400 are securities accounts and the rest are commodities accounts, said Kent Jarrell, a spokesman for the trustee now in control of MF Global.

Isn't this special? This Reuters story was one that I borrowed from yesterday's King Report...and it's well worth the read. The link is here.

Hong Kong's home sales fell for a 10th straight month, dropping by half in October from a year ago as buyers put off purchases.

The value of transactions last month declined 50 percent to HK$22.5 billion (US$2.9 billion), the city's government said in a statement on its website yesterday. Sales of residential units shed 2.2 percent from September, it said.

"Transactions slowed down quite significantly particularly in the secondary market," said Buggle Lau, analyst at Midland Holdings Ltd, Hong Kong's biggest publicly traded realtor. Lau said while transactions in the primary market rose last month, it wasn't enough to offset the slide in used home sales.

This very short story was posted over at the researchinchina.com website one week ago today...and I thank reader 'David in California' for sending it along. The link is here.

A 7pc yield is widely deemed as unsustainable and has previously led to bailouts and talk of default in smaller euro zone economies such as Portugal, Ireland and Greece.

The euro sank 1pc against both the dollar and yen on the news.

Investors yesterday greeted the likely exit of Berlusconi as leader of the eurozone's third-largest economy positively, but then began fretting about who his successor might be and how long political instability would last.

"The mere fact that Italian 10-year bond yields have hit the all important 7 percent level shows that the crisis will not end simply with Berlusconi's excruciatingly slow demise," said Joshua Raymond, chief market strategist at City Index.

This story, posted over at The Telegraph late yesterday morning, is Roy Stephens first offering of the day...and the link is here.

It has taken three trading days since the failure of the G20 summit to detonate the explosive charge on Italy's €1.9 trillion (£1.6 trillion) bond market, the world's third-largest stock of public debt.

Europe's purported "firewall" to safeguard Italy does not, in fact, exist. The EU's vague plans to leverage its EFSF rescue fund to €1 trillion have come to nothing. Investors could see at once that plans to use the fund as a "first loss" bond insurer concentrates risk, dooming France's AAA rating and accelerating contagion to the core.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has been buying Italian bonds, but too slowly to stop the debt spiral. The ECB's new chief, Mario Draghi, kicked off his term with a blunt warning that it would be "pointless" for the bank to try to cap the yields of struggling debtors for long. It was an invitation for frightened investors to dump their bonds.

With almost nothing in place to halt contagion, the market verdict has been swift and brutal.

Here's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard pontificating once again. This story was posted late last night in The Telegraph...and it's a must read. I thank Roy Stephens for this article as well...and the link is here.

A deal on forming a Greek national unity government collapsed as the country headed toward an economic abyss and revived early Thursday the chances of former European Central Bank vice president Lucas Papademos heading the coalition.

Prime Minister George Papandreou said he was handing over to a coalition that does not exist and then failed to install an old-style politician and personal ally as premier.

On a day that was bizarre and chaotic even by Greek political standards, Papandreou wished his successor well and headed off to meet the president -- only for it to emerge that there was no successor due to feuding in the political parties.

You just can't make this stuff up. Why the euro isn't worth zero beats the heck out of me. This Reuters story is from late yesterday...and is Roy's third contribution in a row. This is well worth the read...and the link is here.

German and French officials have discussed plans for a radical overhaul of the European Union that would involve setting up a more integrated and potentially smaller euro zone, EU sources say.

"France and Germany have had intense consultations on this issue over the last months, at all levels," a senior EU official in Brussels told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

"We need to move very cautiously, but the truth is that we need to establish exactly the list of those who don't want to be part of the club and those who simply cannot be part," the official said.

This Reuters piece is imbedded in a zerohedge.com story that reader 'David in California' sent me yesterday. It's a must read...and the link is here.

GoldMoney founder and GATA consultant James Turk today gold King World News yesterday that "cataclysmic" events in the world financial system may be imminent as Italy loses its ability to pay its debts and drags down banks all over the world. This, Turk argues, is a crisis not of capitalism but of socialism, unaffordable entitlements.

I thank Chris Powell for wordsmithing the introduction...and the link to the KWN blog is here.

Is gold about to go through the roof? The price has been creeping up again, after falling by about $200 from its previous record highs of around $1,900.

The price of gold bullion climbed above $1,800 an ounce on Tuesday, rallying to its highest level in almost seven weeks.

This is not surprising, given its traditional role as a safe haven in turbulent times. And the economy could hardly be more precarious, with the euro apparently on the brink of collapse.

This story was posted in The Telegraph early in the morning in North America...and is another Roy Stephens offering. The link is here.

Europe has been kicking the decomposing debt can down the road, but the can has hit the fan.

Investors had hoped that Greece's debt problems would be contained to Greece. They'd hoped the face-saving deal that Germany and France brokered in late October -- which cost Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou his job – would put a floor underneath the euro.

But hope is not an investment strategy. Italian opera is playing alongside Greek tragedy, and investors aren't hanging around to see which other countries join this debt-ridden production.

This rather short finance.yahoo.com story was sent to me by reader Richard Sypher yesterday...and is worth the read if you have the time. The link is here.

Despite a dip in gold coin sales in October, US Mint bought more gold and silver from Idaho's Sunshine Minting Inc.

Sunshine Minting Inc., a closely held company in Coeur d’Alene, received $1.25 billion from the government for precious metals in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, up from $591.4 million during the prior year.

The company supplies raw silver and silver and gold blanks to the U.S. Mint and 13 other government mints around the world.

This very short story posted over at the bullionstreet.com website yesterday, is courtesy of reader 'John in Manchester' in the U.K...and the link is here.

BIG GOLD editor Jeff Clark posted this very interesting commentary in yesterday's edition of Casey's Daily Dispatch...and it's well worth your time. The link is here.

Hotshot hedge fund manager David Einhorn is bullish on gold, but physical gold is no longer his default vehicle for profitable gold exposure.

During the third quarter, Einhorn's Greenlight Capital Re sold physical gold holdings in order to purchase a "significant position" in the Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF. Wit that deliberate shift in the structure of his gold allocation, Einhorn becomes the latest institutional investor to recognize that "a substantial disconnect has developed between the price of gold and the mining companies."

That may just be the greatest understatement of 2011! That disconnect sailed straight past the "substantial" stage earlier this year, such that in recent months, the opportunity to gain coveted gold exposure at truly ludicrous valuations began to stare investors squarely in the face. I have labored to draw attention to the resulting investment opportunity, beginning back in July.

Well, the staff over at The Motley Fool are a little late to this party, but better late than never, I suppose...but they picked a perfect time to tell everyone to load the boat. West Virginia reader Elliot Simon sent me this story posted over at the dailyfinance.com website yesterday...and it, too, is well worth the read. The link is here.

The long clamor about the German gold reserves by GATA and particularly by our friends, the German journalist Lars Schall and the German market analyst Dimitri Speck, this week caught the attention of the German edition of the Financial Times, which published a story headlined "Speculation and Rumors: The Hunt for the Treasure of the Bundesbank."

This GATA release from yesterday has Chris Powell up on his soap box with an extensive preamble...with lots of links...including the headline story above. This is a must read...and the link is here.

China is buying gold as part of a long term strategy to position itself ultimately as the global currency of choice and to the benefit of its citizens who it has encouraged to buy precious metals.

Ever since China loosened its restrictions on precious metals purchases, and indeed started selling the idea of gold and silver investment to the general populace via its state-owned banks, the Asian superpower has rapidly begun to challenge India as the world's largest consumer of gold. Given that it is largely believed that the Chinese state is taking in all its own mined gold (it is currently the world's largest gold producer) into its reserves without declaring the increase, the combined off-take within China of market purchases by the general population plus the amount being taken into its state coffers will soon be getting perhaps close to one third of total world gold output and rising ever faster.

China has always taken the long view and plans for eventualities years in advance. Nothing on the global front is unplanned. This has been seen with the ever increasing number of critical metals and minerals for which China has a virtual monopoly of the global market - rare earths is the most obvious example, but there are a number of other metals where China now provides around 90% of global supplies. Imposition of export quotas ostensibly to protect its own industries then follows, forcing prices up to unprecedented levels, and also forcing companies which require these metals as key parts of specific manufacturing processes to move their plants to China as that is the only way they can guarantee supplies, thus benefiting the Chinese economy as well as helping build employment in the world's most populous country.

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if China banned the export of silver as well...and that would definitely put the Chinese fox amongst the JPMorgan pigeons. We'll see.

I thank reader U.D. for sending me this most excellent story posted over at the mineweb.com website...and the link to this must read story is here.

Geopolitical analyst James G. Rickards, who spoke at GATA's Gold Rush 2011 conference in London in August, told King World News yesterday that a second but secret London Gold Pool is being operated by Western central banks to suppress gold's price...and that he doesn't expect it to survive more than two more years.

An excerpt from the interview has been posted at the KWN website...and I thank Chris Powell for writing the introduction on our behalf. The link to your last must read item of the day, is here.