Foreclosure filings fell 8 percent year-over-year in February, with 206,900 U.S. properties receiving some form of filing, according to RealtyTrac's U.S. Foreclosure Market Report.

But don't be fooled by these numbers. Foreclosure activity is expected to increase 15 percent this year compared to 2011, according to RealtyTrac's Daren Blomquist.

Blomquist also said that foreclosure activity fell to artificially low levels last year because of the fall-out from the robo-signing scandal where banks were accused of shoddy mortgage paperwork and when judges prevented banks from foreclosing on homes.

This short item was posted over at the businessinsider.com website yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for his first offering of the day. The link is here.

China, the largest foreign U.S. creditor, increased its holdings of U.S. government securities in January for the first time in six months as European leaders struggled to contain the region’s sovereign-debt crisis.

Holdings rose by 0.7 percent to $1.16 trillion, the first growth in China’s stake since July, Treasury data released yesterday show. The report also showed that net foreign purchases of Treasuries totaled almost $83 billion in January, compared with net selling of $14.9 billion the month before.

This Bloomberg story was posted on their website yesterday afternoon...and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for sending it along. The link is here.

For a change, everything has been going according to plan in the fight to save the euro in recent weeks. On Wednesday, euro-zone finance ministers gave the green light to the €130 billion ($170 billion) second rescue package for Greece. It's a pure formality after a satisfyingly large proportion of creditors agreed to a debt cut for Greece. Perhaps the most significant success of recent days is that even though the debt cut was deemed a so-called credit event, triggering the payment of the financial contracts known as credit default swaps, hardly anyone seemed to care.

For more than two years, the international financial lobby had been warning the public and governments that these credit default swaps must under no circumstances be triggered, because that would cause a disaster similar to the meltdown that followed the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. Their message, effectively, was that taxpayers should cover all the losses, rather than private-sector creditors. But the CDS horror scenario has failed to become reality.

So has Greece been rescued and financial markets been tamed? Is the euro crisis a thing of the past? Unfortunately not. With their successes in the last few days, euro-zone politicians have done little more than bought themselves time. They must use this window to brace themselves for the next wave of the euro crisis which is about to crash down on Europe.

This story was posted over at the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and is well worth the read. I thank Roy Stephens once again for sending it along...and the link is here.

Nigel Farage is at the top of his game in this tirade against the European Parliament the other day. It's a 3:19 video posted over at youtube.com...and I thank reader U.D. for sharing it with us. It's a must watch for sure...and the link is here.

Swift, the body that handles global banking transactions, says it will cut Iran's banks out of the system on Saturday to enforce sanctions.

The move will isolate Iran financially by making it almost impossible for money to flow in and out of the country via official banking channels.

It will hit its oil industry, but may also have a heavy impact on Iranians who live abroad and send money home.

This bbc.co.uk story was posted on their website early yesterday afternoon their time. It's certainly worth skimming...and I thank Australian reader John Ilmenstein for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

Time is growing short to solve Iran's nuclear-program crisis non-militarily, President Barack Obama said, as a poll showed Americans favor sanctions over bombs.

"Because the international community has applied so many sanctions, because we have employed so many of the options that are available to us to persuade Iran to take a different course, the window for solving this issue diplomatically is shrinking," Obama said Wednesday in a White House Rose Garden news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron.

"I hope that the Iranian regime understands that this is their best bet for resolving this in a way that allows Iran to rejoin the community of nations and to prosper and feel secure themselves," Obama said.

The war drums grow ever louder in this UPI story that was filed from Washington in the wee hours of Thursday morning. It's another Roy Stephens offering...and the link is here.

When it comes to America's security, President Barack Obama has turned out to be just as ruthlessly determined as his predecessor -- particularly when it comes to using drones to wage the war on terror. But the target of his recent legal repositioning might have much less to do with terrorists than with Iran.

Obama had actually come into office promising to end the "imperial presidency" of his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose administration had claimed absolute power unlike anything seen since the Watergate scandal of former President Richard Nixon. Obama had promised to shut down the Guantanamo detention camp and put an end to torture methods that violate human rights. He had declared war on the secretiveness and the controversial wiretapping program of the Bush administration. His own administration was supposed to be more transparent, more open and more honest -- and less belligerent. Obama, the former professor of constitutional law, wanted to reintroduce America to the limits of the constitutional state.

Now that Obama has been in office for three years, it is abundantly clear that he has not made good on most of these pledges.

This short essay was posted over at the spiegel.de website yesterday...and is another offering from Roy Stephens. The link is here.

As tensions escalate, eerie echoes of the run-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are in the air. Feverish U.S. primary campaign rhetoric adds to the drumbeat.

Concerns about “the imminent threat” of Iran are often attributed to the “international community” – code language for U.S. allies. The people of the world, however, tend to see matters rather differently.

The nonaligned countries, a movement with 120 member nations, has vigorously supported Iran’s right to enrich uranium – an opinion shared by the majority of Americans (as surveyed by WorldPublicOpinion.org) before the massive propaganda onslaught of the past two years.

China and Russia oppose U.S. policy on Iran, as does India, which announced that it would disregard U.S. sanctions and increase trade with Iran. Turkey has followed a similar course.

This essay was posted over at the alternet.org website on Tuesday...and is a must read in my opinion. My thanks to Roy once again for sharing this with us...and the link is here.

United States Secretary of State Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton's message to Pakistan was stark; try to go ahead with the IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline, and we're going to take you out financially.

Islamabad, its economy in tatters, living in power-cut land, and desperate for energy, tried to argue. Pakistan's top official in the Petroleum and Natural Resources Ministry, Muhammad Ejaz Chaudhry, stressed that the 2,775-km, $1.5 billion IP was absolutely crucial for Pakistan's energy security.

That fell on deaf ears. Clinton evoked "particularly damaging" sanctions - tied to Washington's push to isolate Iran by all means available and the no-holds-barred campaign to force particularly India, China and Turkey to cut off their imports of Iranian oil and gas.

So as Washington has been impotent to disrupt Pipelineistan moves in Central Asia - by isolating Iran and bypassing Russia - it's now going ballistic to prevent by all means the crucial integration of Southwest Asia and South Asia, from Iran's giant South Pars gas field to Pakistan's Balochistan and Sindh provinces.

For any student of the 21st century version of The Great Game, this short essay posted over at the Asia Times website is an absolute must read from one end to the other. It's Roy Stephens final offering in today's column...and the link is here.

This story was all over the Internet yesterday, although I did hear about it very late on Wednesday night. But after reading it, I decided that because the author was unknown, it could only be classified as hearsay at best...and that's what I told every kind reader that sent me the story. Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge echoes my sentiment with more eloquence than I can muster.

"The metals space is abuzz with a CFTC "comment letter" posted on its website by an alleged "current JPM employee." There is only one problem - this letter is either a complete fraud or simply a total mockery, as it provides absolutely nothing new, and merely regurgitates existing manipulation claims already out in the public domain, and backed by precisely zero evidence."

"Needless to say, anyone can submit such an alleged insider letter, and since there is no name associated to it, we would advise everyone to merely enjoy this a prank attempt."

There may, in fact, be more to this than meets the eye...but the fact that I was born right smack dab in the middle of Missouri, made me question it immediately...and for the same reason stated above.

But, as I told one of my readers in an e-mail last evening..."when someone with all the numbers on JPMorgan et al's silver and gold rigging operation steps up to the plate with the last 12 months of trading data, then I'll be a believer." The link to the zerohedge.com story is here.

Trader and mining entrepreneur Jim Sinclair today told King World News yesterday that while central banks would want the gold price to be "soft" during Greece's "credit event," European countries are beginning to worry that their gold might have been misappropriated by the Federal Reserve for such an operation.

Sinclair also says that interventions against gold have been going on for a long time and are having diminishing effect, and the recent one won't be any different.

I thank Chris Powell for providing the headline...and the introduction. The link to this KWN blog is here.

Interviewed today by King World News, mining entrepreneur Pierre Lassonde shrugs off the recent smash-down of the gold price. Lassonde sees China's government, other central banks, and the Chinese and Indian people continuing to boost the price, with "fireworks" ahead.

I thank Chris once again for providing the preamble and the headline. The link to the KWN blog, which is headlined "Why Gold Could Spike 20% in a Day or Two" is here. With a headline like that, it's certainly worth reading.

Nobody was more surprised than myself when this GATA release popped into my in-box yesterday...as I hadn't been interviewed recently.

But what it turned out to be was my 30-minute presentation at the Casey Research pavilion at the Cambridge House Resource Conference in Vancouver back in late January. I had no idea that it was being recorded.

James Turk's audio interview...and your humble scribe's video presentation...are both contained in this GATA release from yesterday...and the link is here.