The gap between U.S. bank deposits and loans is growing at the fastest pace in two years, providing lenders with more funds to buy bonds and temper the biggest sell-off in Treasuries since 2010.

As deposits increased 3.3 percent to $8.88 trillion in the two months ended July 31, business lending rose 0.7 percent to $7.11 trillion, Federal Reserve data show. The record gap of $1.77 trillion has expanded 15 percent since May, the biggest similar-period gain since July, 2010. Banks have already bought $136.4 billion in Treasury and government agency debt this year, more than double the $62.6 billion in all of 2011, pushing their holdings to an all-time high of $1.84 trillion.

“Bank deposits continue to explode and in turn they continue to buy Treasuries as the economy loses momentum, inflation is trending down, Europe continues to hang over our heads and political uncertainty reigns” said Michael Mata, a money manager in Atlanta at ING Investment Management Americas, which oversees about $160 billion. “There is no reason for interest rates to climb in any meaningful way any time soon.”

This story was posted on the Bloomberg website during the lunch hour in New York yesterday...and I thank Donald Sinclair for sending it. The link is here.

There's a different sort of drought plaguing California, the nation's largest farm state. It's $38 billion agricultural sector is facing a scarcity of labor.

This year is the worst it's been, ever," said Craig Underwood, who farms everything from strawberries to lemons to peppers, carrots, and turnips in Ventura County.

Some crops aren't get picked this season due to a lack of workers.

"We just left them in the field," he said.

The Western Growers Association told CNBC its members are reporting a 20 percent drop in laborers this year. Stronger border controls are keeping workers from crossing into the U.S. illegally, and the current guest worker program is not providing enough bodies.

This CNBC story was posted on their website early yesterday afternoon Eastern time...and I thank Scott Pluschau for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

The first is a 15-minute video interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last week. The next item is a blog posted on the usnews.com Internet site yesterday. It's headlined "How China Is Driving Federal Reserve Policy"...and the link to that is here. Lastly is this 7:25 minute video interview with Deirdre Bolton posted at the bloomberg.com Internet site yesterday. All these items are courtesy of reader Harold Jacobsen, for which I thank him on your behalf.

Paul Tucker, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, told an October meeting of the chief executives of Britain’s largest banks that there was a serious chance none of their businesses would survive to the end of the year.

“Gentlemen, you could all be out of business by Christmas,” Mr Tucker said in a stark warning to the bank chiefs, according to three sources present at the meeting.

The revelation of Mr Tucker’s remarkable warning shows the depth of fear among senior officials over the havoc the collapse of the eurozone would wreak on the British financial system.

Mr Tucker is one of the front-runners to replace Sir Mervyn King as Governor of the Bank of England.

Well, that's going to happen sooner or later anyway, as it's just a matter of when...whether it was last Christmas, this Christmas, or next Christmas...or some point in between. This story was posted on the telegraph.co.uk Internet site on Saturday night...and I thank Donald Sinclair for sending it along. The link is here.

The member of the banking dynasty has taken the position through RIT Capital Partners, the £1.9bn investment trust of which he is executive chairman.

The fact that the former investment banker, a senior member of the Rothschild family, has taken such a view will be seen as a further negative for the currency.

RIT, which Lord Rothschild has led since 1988, had a -7pc net short position in terms of principal currency exposures on the euro at the end of July, up from -3pc at the end of January. Given a net asset value of £1.836bn at the end of July, the position is worth £128m.

Sources close to RIT suggested that the position was not a dogmatic negative view on the euro as a currency, but rather a realistic approach on a currency that remains relatively weak.

This was another Saturday night posting on The Telegraph's website...and is another offering from Donald Sinclair. The link is here.

German eurosceptics quietly hope that Finland will become the first creditor state to storm out of monetary union in disgust, opening the way for others to break free.

Once Finns break the taboo, it would be easier for Germany to extricate itself from an escalating national disaster without inviting opprobrium from across Europe, or so goes the argument.

“We can’t start this off, but the Finns can,” said Hans-Olaf Henkel, former head of Germany’s industry federation.

Berlin’s policy elites are constrained by their honourable - if misdirected - feelings of moral duty towards the euro. They cannot bring themselves to plunge the dagger.

This Ambrose Evans-Pritchard offering was posted on the telegraph.co.uk website on Sunday afternoon BST...and I thank reader Ulrike Marx for bringing it to our attention. It's worth the read...and the link is here.

Spanish banks have invested their customers’ money even without their permission. Helena and Esko Antikainen...from Finland...who live part of the year in Spain, are among the thousands of victims of this illegal practice.

The value of the bank deposits made with Spanish banks by foreigners living in the country is under threat of being slashed drastically. This group of unfortunates also includes a number of Finns living in Spain. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards are facing the same problem. The reason for this is that Spanish banks have offered savings accounts to their clients, from which some of the money has been invested in stock. Now that the Spanish economy has more or less stalled, the value of the shares in many cases has plummeted.

Investments in stock have even been made without seeking permission from the account holders.

People have been under the impression that their capital is sitting there normally in a savings account. In some cases, the banks’ information to customers about the terms and conditions of the accounts has been unclear or insufficient. Within the European Union, bank deposits are protected up to EUR 100,000...but the deposit protection, however, does not cover losses if the money has been invested in stock.

This perfect Catch-22 story was posted on the Finnish website hs.fi/english/...and I thank London, U.K. reader Iain Doherty for sending it. The link is here.

Athens has not been having an easy time coming up with the €11.5 billion in cost cutting measures over the next two years it has promised Europe. Indeed, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is reportedly set to request an additional two years to make those cuts during meetings later this week with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday and French President François Hollande on Saturday.

But according to information obtained by SPIEGEL, the financing gap his country faces could be even greater. During its recent fact-finding trip to Athens, the so-called troika -- made up of representatives from the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund -- found that Greece will have to come up with as much as €14 billion to meet the terms for international aid.

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

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of The Telegraph is usually one of the foremost purveyors of the Euro doom argument, so it's worth sitting up and taking notice at his latest column...

In it, he says The Telegraph can corroborate that Der Spiegel article from this weekend, which said the ECB is preparing some kind of scheme to cap borrowing costs for Spain and Italy.

That article was the subject of analyst skepticism, and it was rejected by the ECB this morning (though in some very careful language).

This Joe Weisenthal piece showed up on the businessinsider.com website late yesterday afternoon...and, once again, I thank Roy Stephens for bringing it to our attention. It's worth reading...as is the link to the Ambrose Evans-Pritchard piece that's imbedded...and the link is here.

Just back from vacation, France's President Francois Hollande plunges right back into a new euro crisis, as he goes to Berlin for talks this week with Chancellor Angela Merkel. And then each of them separately has talks with the new Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, who is hoping to be allowed four years rather than two to carry out the deficit cuts and privatizations required by his European partners.

The chances are not good.

"We cannot responsibly throw money into a bottomless pit," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble said at the weekend.

Volker Kauder, leader of the ruling conservative coalition in the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, was dismissive of Greek hopes. "There is no more latitude, either on the timeframe or the matter itself," he said.

This UPI story was filed from Paris yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for sharing it with us. The link is here.

The family of a senior partner at Deloitte has called for answers after he apparently committed suicide days after the auditing firm was linked to the Standard Chartered Iran dollar trades scandal.

Daniel Pirron, a partner in Delloite’s key General Counsel’s office in New York, was found dead in a car park near his home in Trumbull, Connecticut.

On August 6, Deloitte was accused by the New York Department of Financial Services of aiding Standard Chartered in its “deception” over billions of dollars’ worth of trades involving Iran...and Mr Pirron apparently took his own life seven days later.

Speaking publicly for the first time about the incident, Mr Pirron’s brother, Mike, said the family believed the two events were connected and that Daniel Pirron had warned his daughters the day before his death that there was “big trouble” ahead.

I was suspicious of this 'suicide' when I first heard about it...but decided not to post the story at the time because it wasn't associated with anything going on at the time. Well, in hindsight, there was. This stinks to high heaven...and the contents of the story confirm that. It was also posted on The Telegraph's website on Saturday night...and I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along. It's worth reading...and the link is here.

When President Obama announced last month that he was barring a Baghdad bank from any dealings with the American banking system, it was a rare acknowledgment of a delicate problem facing the administration in a country that American troops just left: for months, Iraq has been helping Iran skirt economic sanctions imposed on Tehran because of its nuclear program.

The little-known bank singled out by the United States, the Elaf Islamic Bank, is only part of a network of financial institutions and oil-smuggling operations that, according to current and former American and Iraqi government officials and experts on the Iraqi banking sector, has provided Iran with a crucial flow of dollars at a time when sanctions are squeezing its economy.

The Obama administration is not eager for a public showdown with the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki over Iran just eight months after the last American troops withdrew from Baghdad.

This 2-page story showed up on The New York Times website on Saturday...and it's a must read for any student of the "new great game". I thank Donald Sinclair for finding it for us...and the link is here.

Construction laborer Yi Jichun has never heard of Illinois or Iowa. But the migrant worker's favorite comfort food comes straight out of the U.S. Midwest: soybean oil.

"Without the oil, it would taste too plain," Yi said as he tucked into a lunch of sliced cucumbers and chicken drumsticks slathered with grease. "I wouldn't want to finish it."

And that has officials in Beijing worried. The worst U.S. drought in half a century is sending global grain prices soaring. The fallout is almost certain to be felt at dinner tables across China. The No. 1 foreign buyer of American soybeans, which are pressed into cooking oil and used for animal feed, China last year purchased about half of U.S. exports, more than $10.4 billion worth, according to the American Soybean Assn. China has also stepped up purchases of U.S. corn and wheat to feed the nation's growing appetite.

This story was posted in the L.A. Times on Sunday...and I 'borrowed' it from yesterday's edition of the King Report. The link is here.

The first blog is with John Hathaway...and it's headlined "This Financial System Is Now In Its Final Stages". The second is with John Embry. It's entitled "Apple, Gold, Manipulation & Financial Implosion". The next blog is from several contributors that Eric King spoke with...including Pierre Lassonde and Rick Rule. It's headlined "Global Collapse Now Accelerating As Central Banks Buy Gold". Next is this blog with Michael Pento...and it's headlined "Prepare For War, Skyrocketing Crude & A Global Depression". Next is this blog with Robert Fitzwilson of The Portola Group. It bears the title "Gold and a NASDAQ Stock that Rocketed 117,000% Higher". The seventh item is this audio interview with Rick Rule...and lastly is this audio interview with Ben Davies.

Expelled ANC Youth leader Julius Malema has urged workers from other mines to join their Lonmin compatriots at Marikana in striking for wage increases.

Malema addressed a few thousand miners and residents of the town near the scene of Thursday's confrontation between police and striking miners, which claimed the lives of 34 miners.

Malema blamed his usual culprits for the violence, saying President Jacob Zuma and police minister Nathi Mthethwa were in charge of the police force that fired on the miners. He called on them to resign.

In a stinging attack, Malema slammed the police's handling of the incident, saying live ammunition should never have been used. He said: "Even if you threaten police, they have no right to use live ammunition against civilians. The minister of Police must step down because this massacre was committed under his supervision, the same thing with President Zuma, he must step down."

According to ex-pat South African Ulrike Marx, who sent me this story..."the S.A. police force is now predominantly black...and there are a lot of other ramifications to this story, not widely reported in most media reports."

Just an example or two: there are old tribal tensions at play here, with the rock drillers from a specific tribal subgroup. Earlier in the week, two policemen had been hacked to death with pangas (machetes). Reports also fail to emphasize the importance of the confrontation between two rival unions, namely the established NUM (symbiotic relationship with the ruling ANC) and the upstart AMCU."...NUM president Senzeni Zokwana refused to leave the safety of a police armoured vehicle to address the miners ..."

This story was posted on the sabc.co.za Internet site on Saturday afternoon...and the link is here.

Violent clashes between police and striking miners have left many people dead this week. But the miners – specifically, the rock drillers – are determined to stay on their outcrop until they are heard. But it’s more than a strike, it’s becoming a war, writes Greg Marinovich in an article published before Thursday’s violence.

Several thousand men cover the orange outcrop of igneous rock like a single organism, spilling on to the dry thorn-veld below.

They are wrapped in blankets; their spears and fighting sticks protruding menacingly as they chant songs of war.

Many have died around this strange geological redoubt; two of them policemen. The violent showdown between these miners and their multinational employer, the platinum giant Lonmin, shows no sign of abating.

This behind-the-scenes story was posted over at the iol.co.za website last Friday...and is another story from Ulrike Marx. The link is here.

Lonmin, the world's third-largest platinum producer, on Tuesday conceded that sacking 3,000 striking workers at its Marikana mine near Johannesburg, South Africa, could lead to more violence.

Police last week opened fire on strikers armed with machetes and sticks, killing 34 and raising the death toll from the week-long dispute to 44.

"It won't help anyone if Lonmin goes out and dismisses a whole lot of people for not coming to work today. It will set us back significantly in terms of violence, in terms of building trust," Mark Munroe, Lonmin executive vice-president for mining, told a local radio station on Tuesday morning.

London-based Lonmin on Monday extended its ultimatum for striking workers to return to duty to Tuesday morning, but workers continued to trickle in as the deadline expired.

This Reuters story was posted on the mineweb.com Internet site early this morning...and I thank Donald Sinclair for sending it to me just before I hit the 'send' button. It's worth reading...and the link is here.

Jeff Clark interviewed Chuck Butler, senior vice president of world markets at EverBank at our last Summit, and even though a few months have passed, the information is just as valid today, if not more so. In this twelve-minute video, Jeff asks Chuck about inflation vs. deflation, why the US dollar is still holding up, how much gold and silver to own, the best currencies for diversification, and his best advice for investors.

This was the introduction that Louis James gave in yesterday's edition of Casey's Daily Dispatch...and the interview with Chuck runs 11:51 minutes. The link is here.

Times are now so tough that Valerio Novelli, a ticket inspector on Rome's buses, is planning to sell his old gold teeth.

In a country suffering from economic crisis, buying gold off desperate people has become one of the few boom industries.

City centres are being transformed as traditional shops go out of business, their signs replaced by ones that announce "Compro Oro", or "I Buy Gold".

The Eurispes think tank estimates the number of "Compro Oro" shops has quadrupled in the last two years. The growth of the industry is "a very good indicator of the level of hardship in the country," said Gian Maria Fara, the think tank's president.

This Reuters story is very similar to the one I posted about Portugal on this subject last week. This was posted over on the mineweb.com Internet site yesterday...and I thank Donald Sinclair for his final offering in today's column. The link is here.