When it comes to hiring top commodity traders, what goes around comes around.

Wall Street, after years of poaching the best and brightest from specialized commodity firms, is losing the war to keep the essential traders who know how to arbitrage copper or store crude.

After financial reforms sounded the death knell for the excessive use of bank money to trade markets two years ago, banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had resigned themselves to watching their proprietary trading rainmakers flee to hedge funds with few limits on risk or compensation.

This cnbc.com story was sent to me by West Virginia reader Elliot Simon yesterday...and the link is here.

The U.S. has been “overmedicated” by public policy and should consider the government’s 1920’s response to recession, said James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.

Responding to a severe economic downturn from 1920 to 1921, the Federal Reserve increased interest rates and the national budget was balanced, moves that kept the painful recession short, New York-based Grant said. In contrast, he said U.S. policy makers are prolonging the pain of the so-called Great Recession by intervening in markets and running unprecedented federal budget deficits.

“The Fed is not content to let interest rates find their levels, they must repress them, and they are not content to let housing prices find their levels, they seek to intervene to prop them up,” Grant said in a radio interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Ken Prewitt and Tom Keene. “The results of all this intervention is not to cure what ails us, but prolongs the symptoms of what distresses us.”

The U.S. Treasury should begin to issue longer-dated bonds backed by gold and investors should also buy gold as it is “something substantial,” Grant said. The bond bull market of the past 30 years has made investors complacent to the risk of owning bonds, he said.

The audio interview, along with the Bloomberg story, is a must listen/read...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for being the first through the door with this story. The link is here.

The markets may have been unusually upbeat about the euro zone in recent weeks, but the ratings agencies clearly remain unconvinced that Europe can get its debt crisis under control.

On Monday, the ratings agency Moody's downgraded a whole raft of euro-zone countries and warned that France, Britain and Austria may lose their top triple-A ratings. The agency said in a statement that it had "adjusted the sovereign debt ratings of selected EU countries to reflect their susceptibility to the growing financial and macroeconomic risks emanating from the euro area crisis."

Among the countries downgraded were Italy, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia and Malta. Italy and Spain saw their rating drop from A2 to A3, Slovakia and Slovenia were downgraded from A1 to A2, Spain from A1 to A3 and Portugal from Ba2 to Ba3. The outlook for all six countries was put as "negative," a sign that Moody's sees a good chance that the ratings will be cut again in the coming 18 months. The negative outlook was prompted by "the continuing uncertainty over financing conditions over the next few quarters and its corresponding impact on creditworthiness," Moody's said.

This story was posted on the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along. The link is here.

Greece's largest police union has threatened to issue arrest warrants for officials from the country's European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders for demanding deeply unpopular austerity measures.

In a letter obtained by Reuters Friday, the Federation of Greek Police accused the officials of "...blackmail, covertly abolishing or eroding democracy and national sovereignty" and said one target of its warrants would be the IMF's top official for Greece, Poul Thomsen.

"Since you are continuing this destructive policy, we warn you that you cannot make us fight against our brothers. We refuse to stand against our parents, our brothers, our children or any citizen who protests and demands a change of policy," said the union, which represents more than two-thirds of Greek policemen.

The threat is largely symbolic since legal experts say a judge must first authorize such warrants, but it shows the depth of anger against foreign lenders who have demanded drastic wage and pension cuts in exchange for funds to keep Greece afloat.

This Reuters story from last Friday was picked up by finance.yahoo.com...and I thank reader 'W. Busser' for sharing it with us. The link is here.

Even on this cold February night, the luxury cars are lined up outside the chic, waterfront fish restaurants in this port suburb of Athens. But Leonidas Koutikas knows where to look. Not even 50 meters off the main promenade, around two corners, misery is everywhere. Koutikas finds a family of five living behind a tangled tent that has been attached to the wall of an apartment building.

Koutikas and his colleagues from the aid organization Klimaka are expected. They hand out their care packages here every night. "Each day the list of those in need gets longer," Koutikas says. He speaks from experience. Until recently, the 48-year-old was sleeping on the streets himself.

Athens has always had a problem with homelessness, like any other major city. But the financial and debt crises have led poverty to slowly but surely grow out of control here. In 2011, there were 20 percent more registered homeless people than the year before. Depending on the season, that number can be as high as 25,000. The soup kitchens in Athens are complaining of record demand, with 15 percent more people in need of free meals.

This Roy Stephens offering from yesterday also came from the spiegel.de website yesterday...and the link is here.

Fears that Greece is heading towards the eurozone's first sovereign debt default hardened when the country's EU creditors abruptly called off an emergency meeting that was supposed to agree a €130bn bailout.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister and head of the eurogroup, blamed Greece's political leaders for failing to deliver on pledges long demanded of them in return for a new bailout funds.

Eurozone finance ministers last week postponed a decision on the rescue amid spiralling mistrust between Athens and its eurozone creditors.

A default...and a withdrawal from the EU...is baked in the cake. It's just a matter of the timing...and how ugly it's going to be when it happens. The story was posted in The Guardian shortly after midnight London time last night. It's another Roy Stephens offering...and the link is here.

As debt-plagued Greece struggles to meet Europe’s strict terms for receiving its next round of bailout money, the lesson of Portugal might bear watching.

Unlike Greece, Portugal is a debtor nation that has done everything that the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have asked it to, in exchange for the 78 billion euro (about $103 billion) bailout Lisbon received last May.

And yet, by the broadest measure of a country’s ability to repay its debts, Portugal is going deeper into the hole.

This two-page New York Times story from yesterday is well worth the read if you have the time. I thank Phil Barlett for sending it our way...and the link is here.

Fear of a civil war is the main reason cited for the global community's refusal to intervene in Syria. But the longer the West stands on the sidelines as Syrian ruler Bashar Assad wages a brutal campaign against his own people, the greater the chances are that one will ensue.

"Humanity compels us to retaliate against murderers," the man wrote, "but politics forces us to remain unmoving spectators. Our poorly considered humanity would be more gruesome than our well-considered inhumanity." These words, which sound like a more elegant version of the Western nations' tepid statements of solidarity with the Syrian insurgents, were penned 221 years ago by Jean Baptiste Cloots, a baron who had emigrated from the Lower Rhine region to France to join the revolution.

All the same, Cloots' words are depressingly contemporary. In 1791, it was the residents of Liège who revolted against their regime and looked to France for support, albeit in vain.

This is another story from the spiegel.de website yesterday...and is also another Roy Stephens offering. The link is here.

Iranian patrol boats and aircraft shadowed a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group as it transited the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday.

The passage ended a Gulf mission that displayed Western naval power amid heightened tensions with Tehran, which has threatened to choke off vital oil shipping lanes.

But officers onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln said there were no incidents with Iranian forces and described the surveillance as routine measures by Tehran near the strategic strait, which is jointly controlled by Iran and Oman.

Casey Research's own David Galland sent this around to the editors yesterday...and here it is. The story was posted over at the cbsnews.com website yesterday...and the link is here.

From dust to dust, global power is no more. So says Zbigniew Brzezinski, the only rival to Henry Kissinger in America's contemporary geopolitical hall of fame.

Talking about his 20th book "Strategic Vision -- America and the Crisis of Global Power" -- and arguably best geopolitical tome, Zbig, as he is universally known, said: "After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we saw the emergence of a single power -- the United States. Many believed we had been chosen by God and commissioned by history to be the world's dominant power.

"Now here we are, two decades later, no longer pre-eminent," he told a luncheon at the Women's National Democratic Club. "We're not declining, as some are suggesting, but we no longer command the world's respect, and we keep reading that China will soon supersede the United States, somewhere between 2016 and 2018" -- four to six years from now.

"No single state is a hegemon," Brzezinski, a Center for Strategic and International Studies counselor, points out, "and we are still the most powerful. But our society is stagnating. We have just blown $1.5 trillion on two unnecessary and costly wars, both in blood and treasure, that were falsely justified and totally unwinnable."

I was saving this UPI commentary for Saturday, but decided not to wait that long. This is Roy's last offering in today's column...and is an absolute must read. If I had to single out one story for you to read out of today's column...this would be it. The link is here.

The first is a short blog that was posted on his website jsmineset.com yesterday...and is headlined "Gold Heading Back Towards A Monetary System, Not Away". I thank Bill Holter for bringing that story to my attention yesterday...and the link is here.

The second, is an interview that Eric King sent me yesterday...and the introduction that follows is by Chris Powell..."Gold trader, mining entrepreneur, and market analyst Jim Sinclair told King World News yesterday that central banks are not trying to suppress the price of gold as they are trying to prevent gold from rising violently and trying to control gold's volatility, which upsets the currency markets." The link to that blog is here.

I had the pleasure of meeting Bob at the GATA conference in London last August...and his interview with Eric King is well worth the listen. The blog/interview is headlined "Fitzwilson - The Entire Planet's Financial System is at Stake"...and I couldn't agree more with what he has to say, as he sounds just like me on this issue. The link is here.

This is another King World News blog that Eric sent me yesterday...and it's very similar in tone to the Bob Fitzwilson interview above. It was posted on the KWN website yesterday...and the link is here.

My good friend Peter Spina, the proprietor over at goldseek/silverseek.com, sent me the links to both the audio and written transcript of this interview yesterday afternoon.

In the interview Ron says that..."I’d like to get the audit, but I wouldn’t be totally shocked to find out that a lot of shenanigans have been going on. So, this is the reason, not only should there be an audit of the Federal Reserve, it should definitely include gold.”

The link to the audio interview [a hair over 12 minutes] is here...and the link to the transcript is here.