Housing was charging back. Spring sprung early. Sentiment among home builders doubled in six months. Any talk that the fundamentals might not be supporting the sentiment was met with harsh criticism. And then suddenly it wasn’t.

A slew of new housing data last week disappointed the analysts and the stock market, and all of a sudden you started to hear concern that maybe housing wasn’t exactly in a robust recovery.

This is no surprise to me. This 'new dawn' in U.S. real estate will turn out to be a false dawn in a hurry. The U.S. is years away from a bottom in the housing market...either new or resale.

I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for sending me this cnbc.com story from yesterday...and the link is here.

Yet one bubble which the Federal Government managed to blow in the meantime to staggering proportions in virtually no time, for no other reason than to give the impression of consumer re-leveraging, was the student debt bubble, which at last check just surpassed $1 trillion, and is growing at $40-50 billion each month. However, just like subprime, the first cracks have now appeared.

It was just last week that I posted a story about this $1 Trillion dollar student debt bubble...and now we find out that quite a significant amount of that is past due. No surprises here...and it's just a matter of how bad it will end up being.

This zerohedge.com story is another offering from Elliot Simon...and the link is here.

The granddaddy of property tax revolts is now underway in North Dakota.

The North Dakota group, Empower the Taxpayer writes "On June 12, 2012, the voters of North Dakota will have the opportunity to make North Dakota truly 'Legendary', as the first to pass a state constitutional amendment that will abolish the property tax, prioritize spending by the legislature, and finally give local governments something they never had: true local control over spending."

Public unions and proponents of big government are now involved in a major wave of fear mongering because North Dakota counties get about 60 percent of their revenue from property tax.

If the amendment passes, school districts will simply have to get funding from another source, or cut budgets.

This interesting article was posted over at Mish Shedlock's website on Sunday...and is Roy Stephens first offering of the day. The link is here.

South Africa this week will take some initial steps to unseat the US dollar as the preferred worldwide currency for trade and investment in emerging economies.

Thus the nation is expected to become party to endorsing the Chinese currency, the renminbi, as the currency of trade in emerging markets.

This means getting a renminbi-denominated bank account, in addition to a dollar account, could be an advantage for African businesses that seek to do business in the emerging markets.

The move is set to challenge the supremacy of the US dollar. This, experts say, is the latest salvo in the greatest worldwide currency war since the 1930s.

This story was filed from Johannesburg on Sunday...and was posted on the citypress.co.za website. I borrowed it from a GATA release...and the link is here.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble have long opposed a further expansion of the euro-zone bailout fund, which would expose German taxpayers to billions in new liabilities. But SPIEGEL has learned that Merkel has given up her opposition and will likely agree to strengthen the firewall later this week.

Government sources said the two politicians, who are both members of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), no longer plan to oppose the wishes of most of the other member states in the common currency zone to combine the remaining funds of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) with that of its successor, the permanent European Stability Mechanism (ESM), to create a more effective firewall to prevent a contagion effect in the euro crisis.

That pretty much makes it a global clean sweep of "Inflate...or die." This is Roy's second offering of the day...and it was posted over at the German website spiegel.de yesterday. The link is here.

Speaking to a conference of influential central bankers from around the world and leading academic experts on monetary policy, Trichet said it could still turn out that the bond-buying, asset purchases and liquidity injections by global central banks might go away after the financial system gets back on its feet.

That is the optimistic scenario, he said.

But Trichet said there was a “less flattering conjecture” that the extraordinary actions will be part of a new “permanent regime.”

This is another cute way of saying it's either "Inflate...or die." This marketwatch.com story was posted on their website on Saturday...and I borrowed it from yesterday's King Report. It's worth reading...and the link is here.

Traders were alarmed by signs that Mariano Rajoy was losing popular support for his programme to reduce Spain’s burgeoning debts, without which the country may need a Greek-style bail-out.

The prime minister’s PP party won 50 seats in the crucial Andalusia elections but failed to win a majority as the opposition leftist PSOE party won 47 seats.

Alastair Newton, political analyst at Nomura, said: “Failure to win in Andalusia, whose regional deficit was more than double its 1.3pc of Spanish GDP target for 2011 and which voted against the central government’s 1.5pc target for this year, represents a potentially serious setback in efforts to rein in the total national deficit to 5.3pc.” He added: “The outcome in Andalusia may also make the challenges PP faces at the national level even more daunting.”

This story was posted in The Telegraph yesterday evening...and I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along. The link is here.

And you thought Nigel Farage was vitriolic. Well, Mr. Bloom is right behind him. This 3:09 minute video is from ten months ago, but it might as well have been said ten minutes ago, as it's still 100% relevant. It's posted over at the sorisomail.com website...and it's well worth watching. I thank Roy Stephens once again...and the link is here.

China has unveiled legislation enshrining police powers to hold people at unknown locations, but has removed a controversial secrecy clause after an outcry.

Experts had warned that the original draft would have legalised disappearances by allowing police to hold some suspects for up to six months without informing their families.

"The real issue is not what the laws say, but how they are enforced," Pu Zhiqiang, a Beijing lawyer who has taken on sensitive cases such as those involving dissidents, said.

"The pattern is that the Communist party can play by rules when there aren't special circumstances – but whenever there are special circumstances, it doesn't have to play by them."

Police later arrived at Pu's office, preventing him from granting further interviews.

This story was posted in The Guardian on March 8th...and I thank reader Eddie Costik for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

Zhou Yongkang, a member of China's ruling Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) and head of the country's 1.5 million-strong police force, is the latest and most senior leader to fall in the battle for control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) if rumors of his downfall have any substance. It was certainly a fall foretold.

Rumors late last week of Zhou's crash from grace came after talk of an attempted coup in Beijing last Monday night or early on Tuesday, supposedly linked to his protégé Bo Xilai, former party boss of the strategically important Chongqing municipality and until his dismissal this month a contender to succeed Zhou on the PSC when he steps down in November.

Bo's dismissal, announced on March 14, was "the most important political event in China in more than two decades"; that is, since the party schism that opened over the crackdown of Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. He is now reportedly under arrest, though still a member of the 25-strong politburo, the stepping stone to the PSC. Any denunciation of Zhou would overshadow those events by a large margin.

This 3-page story showed up posted on the Asia Times website early on their Tuesday morning...and is another offering from Roy Stephens. The link is here.

The president of Argentina’s Central Bank (BCRA), Mercedes Marcó del Pont, stressed the importance of the recently approved bank’s charter reform and denied that printing currency leads to the creation of an inflationary state “since inflation is rooted in other causes”.

If I lived in Argentina, I'd be buying precious metals with both hands after a statement like that. You can't make this stuff up. I thank Casey Research's own Louis James for sending this along. It's posted over at the mercopress.com website..and the link is here.

Interviewed by King World News yesterday, Sprott Asset Management's John Embry points to recent comments by U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner indicating that virtually infinite new government debt will be necessary to keep the government and the economy going. This, Embry says, will be highly inflationary, against which gold, silver, and their mining shares will provide protection even as they are all very cheap at the moment.

I borrowed the headline and introduction from Chris Powell's GATA release yesterday...and the link to the KWN interview headlined "Massive QE Near as System Moves Closer to Collapse" is here.

In his new essay posted over at the GoldMoney.com website, economist and former banker Alasdair Macleod lays out "Asia's Golden Future," the development of a trade-settlement currency system allowing the continent to escape the West's system.

I thank Chris Powell for wordsmithing the introduction for us...and the link is here.

Trader, mining entrepreneur, and gold advocate Jim Sinclair today told King World News that the U.S. government's use of the international payments system as a weapon of war is likely to prompt the re-monetization of gold throughout the world outside the American empire.

This is another KWN blog that Chris wrote the introduction for...and the link is here.

Well, the story about the drilled out gold kilo-bar that was all over the Internet on the weekend resulted in this posting by Bron Suchecki over at The Perth Mint in Australia.

Chris Powell introduction is a must read...as are Bron's comments in this GATA release...and the link is here.

Dennis Gartman got out of gold last week, but he's back thanks to an inadvertent push by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

"I was wrong in standing aside," said the publisher of The Gartman Letter. "Fortunately I didn’t stand aside on much. I got scared. The pros get more frightened than amateurs in this business, and the first rule is to keep your powder dry."

"Sometimes you get lucky" and "Dr. Bernanke got me a little lucky this morning," said Gartman. He said he "got lucky" with Bernanke's easing comments, indicating possibly another round, which would be QE3, is back on the table.

Dennis has been dissing gold just about all the way up in this bull market, so I'm not sure how much of a 'pro' he really is...or thinks he is. Chris Powell's comment on this news item was as follows..."Time to sell?" I think not. This cnbc.com story was posted on their website yesterday...and the first person through the front door with it was reader Eddie Costik with his second offering in today's column. The link is here.

In his March contribution to Investor's Digest of Canada, Sprott Asset Management's chief investment strategist, John Embry has a few things to say about that black hole of debt that Greece [and other PIIGS] are being sucked into...and what that may mean for precious metal prices going forward.

The article is posted over at the sprott.com website...and I thank Australian reader Wesley Legrand for sharing this article with us. It's a must read of course...and the link is here.

In Don Coxe's latest and typically excellent letter..."All Clear?"...he highlights the opportunity in precious metals mining companies...

"In our view, we have entered the most favourable era for gold prices in our lifetime, and the share prices of the great mining companies will eventually outperform bullion prices."

Gold remains one of the most widely misunderstood assets in the investible world. Indeed, it may be better to refer to it as a means of saving that does not expose the saver to counterparty or credit risk or to the depredations of the monetary authorities.

As Don Coxe makes clear, governments are running deficits "beyond the forecasts of all but the hardiest gold bugs five years ago; central banks are printing money and creating liquidity beyond the forecasts of all but the most paranoid gold bugs a year ago."

I posted the 30-minute Don Coxe audio commentary about ten days ago...but here is the essence of it in one short column posted over at zerohedge.com yesterday. It's another must read of course...and the first reader I received this from yesterday was Phil Barlett, for which I thank him. The link is here.