Sherry Hunt never expected to be a senior manager at a Wall Street bank. She was a country girl, raised in rural Michigan by a dad who taught her to fish and a mom who showed her how to find wild mushrooms. She listened to Marty Robbins and Buck Owens on the radio and came to believe that God has a bigger plan, that everything happens for a reason.

She got married at 16 and didn’t go to college. After she had her first child at 17, she needed a job. A friend helped her find one in 1975, processing home loans at a small bank in Alaska. Over the next 30 years, Hunt moved up the ladder to mortgage-banking positions in Indiana, Minnesota and Missouri, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its July issue.

In November 2004, Hunt, now 55, joined Citigroup Inc. as a vice president in the mortgage unit. It looked like a great career move. The housing market was booming, and the New York- based bank, the sixth-largest lender in the U.S. at the time, was responsible for 3.5 percent of all home loans. Hunt supervised 65 mortgage underwriters at CitiMortgage Inc.’s sprawling headquarters in O’Fallon, Missouri, 45 minutes west of St. Louis.

This is an incredible read, but I must warn you in advance that it's a long read. It was posted over at the bloomberg.com website yesterday...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for sending it. The link is here.

We are in the middle of the busiest 48 hours in the history of economics. And ahead of today's big US employment situation report, we're getting tons of leading economic data from all over the world.

At the beginning of each month, Markit, HSBC, RBC, JP Morgan, and several other major data gathering institutions publish the latest local readings of the purchasing managers index (PMI). Each reading is based on surveys of hundreds of companies in each country. From Markit:

PMIs are based on monthly surveys of carefully selected companies. These provide an advance indication of what is really happening in the private sector economy by tracking variables such as output, new orders, stock levels, employment and prices across the manufacturing, construction, retail and service sectors.

The PMI surveys are based on fact, not opinion, and are among the first indicators of economic conditions published each month. The data are collected using identical methods in all countries so that international comparisons may be made.

This live PMI feed from all over the world is really something to see...and it was posted on the businessinsider.com website just after midnight. I thank Roy Stephens for sending it...and it's definitely worth a look. From the data that's in as of this hour...5:10 a.m. Eastern time...it isn't looking very good. The U.K. is particularly ugly. The link is here.

The picture is rather stark. This is a chart shown in an article at Global Research - "Financial Implosion: Global Derivatives at 1,200 Trillion Dollars 20 Times the World Economy". It bears repeating.

Specifically the chart shows the assets of five of the USA's largest banks vs. their respective derivative position. Derivatives dwarf the asset position of the banks. Wachovia and HSBC (USA) are not even amongst the top five derivative players in the US. The top five in order are JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. There is a huge drop off in derivative positions after the top five players.

The global derivatives market is estimated by some at $1,200 trillion ($1.2 quadrillion). Estimating the size of the market is difficult. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) shows a size of $647 trillion as of December 2011. However, some market followers who have written books on the subject have estimated the market as being even larger at upwards of $1.2 quadrillion. At that level it is 20 times the size of the global economy estimated at $60 to $70 trillion.

This rather short read was posted over at the gold-eagle.com website, is a must read in my opinion...and I thank Phil Barlett for sharing it with us. The link is here.

US and European regulators are essentially forcing banks to buy up their own government's debt—a move that could end up making the debt crisis even worse, a Citigroup analysis says.

Regulators are allowing banks to escape counting their country's debt against capital requirements and loosening other rules to create a steady market for government bonds, the study says.

While that helps governments issue more and more debt, the strategy could ultimately explode if the governments are unable to make the bond payments, leaving the banks with billions of toxic debt, says Citigroup strategist Hans Lorenzen.

This CNBC story from yesterday is courtesy of West Virginia reader Elliot Simon...and the link is here.

The European Commission threw Spain two potential life lines on Wednesday, offering more time to reduce its budget deficit and direct aid from a eurozone rescue fund to recapitalise distressed banks.

The Madrid stock market hit a nine-year low as Spanish borrowing costs flew higher.

Jose Carlos Diez, a financial analyst, said "Since 2010 the main points of tension in Spain mostly come from abroad, mainly from Greece, but they don't affect France or Holland, so Spain has an idiosyncratic risk."

This story was posted on the bbc.co.uk website early yesterday morning...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for his second offering in today's column. The link is here.

Here we go again. Back in July 2011 we wrote an article entitled "The Real Banking Crisis" where we discussed the increasing instability of the Eurozone banks suffering from depositor bank runs. Since that time (and two LTRO infusions and numerous bailouts later), Eurozone banks, as represented by the Euro Stoxx Banks Index, have fallen more than 50% from their July 2011 levels and are now in the midst of yet another breakdown led by the abysmal situation currently unfolding in Greece and Spain.

On Wednesday, May 16th, it was reported that Greek depositors withdrew as much as €1.2 billion from their local Greek banks on the preceding Monday and Tuesday alone, representing 0.75% of total deposits.1 Reports suggest that as much as €700 million was withdrawn the week before. Greek depositors have now withdrawn €3 billion from their banking system since the country's elections on May 6th, seemingly emptying what was left of the liquidity remaining within the Greek banking system.2 According to Reuters, the Greek banks had already collectively borrowed €73.4 billion from the ECB and €54 billion from the Bank of Greece as of the end of January 2012 - which is equivalent to approximately 77% of the Greek banking system's €165 billion in household and business deposits held at the end of March.3 The recent escalation in withdrawals has forced the Greek banks to draw on an €18 billion emergency fund (released on May 28th), which if depleted, will leave the country with a cushion of a mere €3 billion.4 It's now down to the wire. Greece is essentially €21 billion away from a complete banking collapse, or alternatively, another large-scale bailout from the European Central Bank (ECB).

If I had to only pick one story for you to read today...this would be the one. Eric Sprott and David Baker's monthly "Markets at a Glance"...are must reads by all. The link is here.

A Hungarian minister has accused the EU of trying to over-extend its power amid the financial crisis.

Gyorgy Matolcsy, the 56-year-old economy minister from the nationalist Fidesz party, said in an op-ed in the business weekly Heti Valasz on Thursday (31 May) that he wants a "Europe of nations" and not a "European empire" and that Hungary should stay out of the euro.

"The effort to centralise the European Union since 2008 has not been successful," he said, referring to the start of the crisis. "The centralisation of a European empire, that is to say the further strengthening of Brussels, is contrary to our interests, because it erodes the independence of the Hungarian state, necessary for the country's economic development."

This story was posted on the euobserver.com website yesterday afternoon...and is another article courtesy of Roy Stephens. The link is here.

Spooked by a sharply slowing economy, China’s leaders have begun opening the financial spigots to build still more roads and airports and subsidize consumer purchases, reprising measures that enabled the nation to sail mostly unscathed through the last great global recession.

But the leaders are signaling that the latest round of stimulus spending will fall far short of the four trillion renminbi, or $585 billion at the time, that the government poured into the economy in 2008 and 2009. That spurred a torrent of bank lending, part of it for dubious projects that many experts say will wind up having to be written off in coming years.

This piece showed up in The New York Times on Wednesday...and I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along. The link is here.

If Raoul Pal was some doomsday spouting windbag, writing in all caps, arbitrarily pasting together disparate charts to create 200 page slideshows, it would be easy to ignore him. He isn't. The founder of Global Macro Investor "previously co-managed the GLG Global Macro Fund in London for GLG Partners, one of the largest hedge fund groups in the world. Raoul came to GLG from Goldman Sachs where he co-managed the hedge fund sales business in Equities and Equity Derivatives in Europe.

Raoul Pal retired from managing client money in 2004 at the age of 36 and now lives on the Valencian coast of Spain, from where he writes." It is his writing we are concerned about, and specifically his latest presentation, which is, for lack of a better word, the most disturbing and scary forecast of the future of the world we have ever seen....

And we see a lot of those.

This zerohedge.com posting was all over the Internet last night...and the 32-page slide presentation is also a must read from one end to the other.

Reader "Michael"...who sent me this story had this to say: "Hi Ed, as usual I'm pretty sure every man and his dog will forward this one to you. As evidence of the Chinese slow down, I took the high speed train from Wuhan to Guangzhou last Saturday. Wuhan train station is huge, new and beautiful, probably similar in size to Paddington station in London or Denver International Airport. It was also pretty much empty, except for workers. The trains are fantastic, but also empty. I had two first class carriages to myself for most of the four hour ride. Scary stuff."

As I've been saying for years in this space, if the powers that be weren't propping up everything that wanted to implode...or suppress the price of everything that wanted to blast off to the outer edges of the know universe...the world's economic, financial and monetary system would be a smoldering ruin in five business days. This piece sums that up nicely.

The link to the Zero Hedge story is here...and as I mentioned above, it falls into the must read category like the Sprott piece.

Hedge Fund manager David Einhorn, well known for his persuasive belittling of companies he has shorted – a recent successful target was Green Mountain Coffee Roasters – has slyly taken on a sturdier target in his May 29 letter to holders in his Greenlight Capital funds: Warren Buffett.

Apparently he didn’t take kindly to Buffett’s ridicule. Without ever mentioning gold, Einhorn mocks by imitation Buffett figurative stacking up of assets, using Omaha, Buffett’s home town, in the argument:

“The debate around currencies, cash, and cash equivalents continues. Over the last few years, we have come to doubt whether cash will serve as a good store of value. If you wrapped up all the $100 bills in circulation, it would form a cube about 74 feet per side. If you stacked the money seven feet high, you could store it in a warehouse roughly the size of a football field. The value of all that cash would be about a trillion dollars. In a hundred years, that money will have produced nothing. In a thousand years, it is likely that the cash will either be worthless or worth very little. It will not pay you interest or dividends and it won’t grow earnings, though you could burn it for heat. You’d have to pay someone to guard it. You could fondle the money. Alternatively, you could take every U.S. note in circulation, lay them end to end, and cover the entire 116 square miles of Omaha, Nebraska. Of course, if you managed to assemble all that money into your own private stash, the Federal Reserve could simply order more to be printed for the rest of us.”

Mr. Einhorn was obviously taking no prisoners with commentary like that. This short piece was posted over at the ycharts.com Internet site on Wednesday...and I thank reader Donald Sinclair for sharing it with us. It's certainly worth reading if you have the time...and the link is here.

The first commentary is with James Turk...and it's headlined "This Coming Disaster Will Be Worse Than Lehman 2008". The next blog is with Egon von Greyerz...and is titled "Market Chaos & Incredibly Important 200-Year Chart". And lastly is this audio interview with Robert Arnott. I posted the blog in this space yesterday.

For some people, gold is an investment. For others, it's a religion. The latter aren't satisfied with a gold fund. They need to own the metal itself. "People buy physical gold usually for one of two reason," says Peter Hug, director at Kitco Metals, a Montreal-based precious metals dealer. "One is privacy: They don't want anyone to know they have it. Secondly, they're worried because newsletter writers since the '80s have been saying the government's going to confiscate your gold, the world's coming to an end and you're going to need gold to barter." Acting on such fears come at a price.

This 13-slide presentation was posted on the Bloomberg Internet site on Wednesday morning...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for his third and final offering in today's column. The link is here.

The macro-economic conditions that have supported gold’s bull run over the past decade have not change; they’ve become worse. In Europe, the Bloomberg Europe 500 Banks and Financial Services Index, is down around 35% over the last year. In the US, the question is not whether there will be a recession, but when.

The traditional view is that three asset classes (stocks, bonds and cash) are sufficient to achieve diversification. But only precious metals offer negative correlation to those three; a portfolio that has only positively correlated asset classes is not balanced or diversified. Holding cash does not work either; currencies are performing miserably against gold.

Gold has been a store of value and wealth preservation for more than 3,000 years, while all fiat currencies have reverted to zero value after around 30 years. By that measure, the clock is ticking for the US dollar; it has been 41 years since President Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971.

This very worthwhile read was posted over at the bmgbullion.com website on Tuesday...and I thank Paul Brent for bringing it to my attention. The link is here.

The gold standard, under which any holder of paper dollars could redeem them for gold at the US Treasury, is now within the living memory of just a few million Americans, nearly all of whom would be dangerous behind the wheel. But thanks to the money printing and the federal deficits that have grown to astounding scales since 2008, and thanks also to the clashing pronouncements of Ron Paul and Ben Bernanke, the idea of a gold standard has resurfaced in the public's consciousness.

I'm happy to see the concept enjoying a revival. Reading about it in the mainstream press and hearing it mentioned on the cable news shows makes me feel a little less like a Martian. It has almost made me feel avant-garde.

Despite my enjoyment of the revival, I've noticed that the idea seldom is presented as a clear and definite proposal or as an invitation to revisit an institution that worked well in the past. Too often, it shows up as little more than a slogan or a taunt aimed at central bankers or as just a political fashion statement. So let's take a closer look at what it really means. It's not that complicated.

This excellent article by Casey Research's own Terry Coxon was posted on the CR website yesterday afternoon. It's most certainly worth reading...and I thank Roy Stephens for bringing it to my attention. The link is here.