Two top Republican Congressmen have asked regulators to further delay the so-called Volcker rule that would ban U.S. banks from proprietary trading.

Representatives Spencer Bachus of Alabama and Jeb Hensarling of Texas sent a letter to regulators Thursday requesting a delay of the rule’s effective date for two years after the final version is issued. They cited concerns about disagreements among regulators and a lack of transparency in the rule writing. Bachus is the House Financial Services Committee chairman; Hensarling will succeed him in the next Congress.

“Given the time that it will take for you to agree on one version of the Volcker Rule as well as the tremendous uncertainty that market participants face in trying to anticipate what the final rule will look like, we respectfully suggest that the Federal Reserve Board delay the Volcker Rule’s effective date,” the lawmakers wrote.

This story showed up on the moneynews.com Internet site late on Thursday afternoon...and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for his first of many stories in today's column. The link is here.

As part of the White House's "opening offer" in the Fiscal Cliff negotiations, here's what Geithner proposed, according to The New York Times' Jonathan Weisman: To ensure that there are no more crises like last year’s impasse, Mr. Geithner proposed permanently ending Congressional purview over the federal borrowing limit, Republican aides said. He said that Congress could be allowed to pass a resolution blocking an increase in the debt limit, but that the president would be able to veto that resolution. Only if two-thirds of lawmakers overrode that veto could Congress block a higher borrowing limit.

Nailed it. This almost completely prevents a debt ceiling crisis ever again, while keeping the ceremonial aspect that people like. There would still be votes, but they'll mainly serve as a way to let politicians play politics, without putting anything at risk. For what it's worth, after the 2011 standoff, when Obama wanted to be sure that the debt ceiling hike would get the country through the 2012 election, this was the method used. The ceiling was raised in a few steps, giving the Republicans a few votes to register their displeasure.

It's so reasonable, nobody could possibly disagree.

What??? I can't believe I just read that...and I'm sure you can't either. This story was posted on the businessinsider.com Internet site on Thursday evening Eastern time. I thank Roy Stephens for sending it along...and it's worth the read...and the link is here.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, says he “burst into laughter” Thursday when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner outlined the administration proposal for averting the fiscal cliff. He wasn’t trying to embarrass Geithner, McConnell says, only responding candidly to his one-sided plan, explicit on tax increases, vague on spending cuts.

Geithner’s visit to his office left McConnell discouraged about reaching a “balanced” deal on tax hikes and spending reductions designed to prevent a shock to the economy in January. “Nothing good is happening” in the negotiations, McConnell says, because of Obama’s insistence on tax rate hikes for the wealthy but unwillingness to embrace serious spending cuts.

Geithner suggested $1.6 trillion in tax increases, McConnell says, but showed “minimal or no interest” in spending cuts.

This story showed up on The Weekly Standard website early on Thursday evening...and it's a story that I borrowed from yesterday's edition of the King Report. The link is here.

High and volatile global food prices have become the “new norm,” creating increased risk for supplies at a time when 12 percent of the population remains chronically undernourished, the World Bank said.

Even after the World Bank’s food-price index slipped from a record in July, the measure was still 7 percent higher in October than a year earlier, the Washington-based lender said today in a report. While costs have dropped in recent months, fats and oils still are 12 percent more expensive than a year earlier, and grains are “very close” to the all-time high reached in 2008, the bank said.

“A new norm of high prices seems to be consolidating,” Otaviano Canuto, the World Bank Group’s vice president for poverty reduction and economic management, said in an e-mailed statement. “Although we haven’t seen a food crisis as the one of 2008, food security should remain a priority.”

This Bloomberg piece was posted on their website late on Thursday afternoon...and my thanks go out to Elliot Simon once again. The link is here.

It’s imperative to constantly test one’s thesis – in my case, an unconventional view of the world of finance, the markets and the global economy. Does one’s analytical framework help explain system behavior? Of course, various perspectives come replete with biases, blurry vision and potentially perilous blind spots. Often it is too easy to simply see what one wants to see. At the same time, a sound framework and proper perspective create the opportunity for more objective analysis. I’ll add that history has shown that this all becomes keenly relevant during manias.

The U.S. stock market has more than doubled from 2009 lows. Financial conditions seemingly couldn’t be looser. November saw a record $165bn of U.S. corporate debt issuance. This year will see near record corporate debt sales. Junk bond issuance will be a new all-time high. System Credit growth will be the strongest since 2008. Recently, consumer confidence has jumped to a four-year high. The nation’s housing markets are showing signs of life. GDP would be generally OK, except for the matter of the unprecedented fiscal and monetary excess necessary to generate such limited economic expansion.

“The Federal Reserve has been explicit about why it has been holding short-term interest rates near zero and has purchased $2.5 trillion in Treasury and government-backed mortgage bonds to push long-term rates to once-unimaginable lows: Not only does it hope cheap money will make borrowing and spending more attractive to businesses and consumers. It also wants to chase investors out of super-safe U.S. Treasuries and mortgages and into stocks, corporate bonds and other assets riskier than Treasuries. Boosting those prices, the central bank figures, will make households richer, increase the value of collateral that banks hold against loans and encourage executives—always happier when stock prices are rising—to invest. Chairman Ben Bernanke and his allies at the Fed think all this is working as they had hoped, though they caution regularly that it isn’t enough to resuscitate the U.S. economy nor is it without risks.”

History will not be kind.

Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin, posted over at the prudentbear.com Internet site nearly every Friday, is always a must read for me. I thank reader U.D. for bringing it to my attention yesterday evening...and the link is here.

1. Only one of the big countries is doing well -- Germany.

3.) Five countries have been contracting YoY for four straight quarters; Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Netherlands and Portugal. Greece's contraction is especially severe.

4.) Four countries have been contracting YoY for three quarters: Spain, Czech Republic and Hungary.

5.) Four of the give largest economies are either barely growing or shrinking: UK, Spain, Italy and France.

6.) Only three countries are growing at strong rates: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

This short story and embedded table of numbers showed up on the businessinsider.com Internet site late Friday morning...and I thank Roy Stephens for sending it our way. The link is here.

Credit-rating agency Moody's Investors Service cut its rating for the euro-zone rescue funds ESM and EFSF to Aa1 from Aaa following its downgrade of France earlier in November, the agency said on Friday.

It said the downgrade of the ESM and the EFSF, which were created to stabilize the euro zone by providing financial assistance to euro area member states in difficulty, was prompted by the high correlation in credit risk among the rescue funds and their largest financial supporters.

Moody's stripped France of its prized triple-A badge this month, cutting the sovereign credit rating on Europe's No. 2 economy by one notch to Aa1 from Aaa. It cited an uncertain fiscal outlook and deteriorating economy.

One wonders if this downgrade was done to keep all eyes off the "fiscal cliff" impasse in the U.S.? This story was posted on the CNBC website early on Friday evening...and is another offering from Elliot Simon. The link is here.

The closer you read Willem Buiter's imperial uber-blick of the world economy, the more astonishing it becomes.

Citigroup's end of year forecast – Prospects for Economies and Financial Markets in 2013 and Beyond – is in essence a celebration of American revival and ascendancy. It sentences Europe to slow economic death.

The growth gap in 2012 between the US (+2.2) and the eurozone (-0.4) is the 2.6pc, the biggest since 1993.

Professor Buiter – Citi's chief economist – said this is not a one-off. The differential will widen to 3.4pc in 2014 and continue at extreme levels into the latter part of the decade.

This Ambrose Evans-Pritchard blog showed up on the telegraph.co.uk Internet site on Thursday sometime...and It's another offering courtesy of Roy Stephens. The link is here.

Despite serious doubts over Chancellor Angela Merkel's handling of the euro crisis among the center-left, German parliamentarians on Friday voted to approve a new round of aid measures for Greece. Most Germans, however, would prefer to see the country go bankrupt.

By a vote of 473 to 100, German lawmakers approved the package of measures hammered out by euro-zone finance ministers in late-night negotiations earlier in the week. While 23 lawmakers belonging to Chancellor Angela Merkel's governing coalition rebelled, the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens voted in favor of the package as expected. The vote also clears the way for the next tranche of emergency aid, worth €44 billion ($57 billion), to be paid out to Athens.

The aid package includes a cut in interest rates Athens must pay on loans already received as well as an extension on the periods of those loans. It also includes a debt buyback program, which will see Greece repurchase sovereign bonds for a fraction of their face value.

This news item showed up on the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and it should come as no surprise that it's courtesy of Roy Stephens. The link is here.

In the heat of a June night, Eleni Spanopoulou found her audience at an Athens hotel turning ugly. Mutiny and violence hung in the air.

For hours the leader of the Greek journalists' social security fund had been chairing a meeting about disastrous losses on retirement savings caused by the country's economic collapse. "She tried to present herself as the fund's savior and asked (members) to double contributions to 6 percent of salaries," said one of those present that night at the Titania hotel. Spanopoulou, 58, did not succeed.

When she rose to leave around midnight, enraged fund members first swore, then waded in punching, kicking and tearing at her clothes, according to witnesses. A bodyguard managed to bustle her out of the room, but another group caught her just outside the hotel and gave her a second beating. She spent the night in hospital.

This Reuters story, filed from Athens early yesterday morning Eastern time, is a must read in my opinion. Sooner or later every socialist society will run up against the same problems...and it will only be a matter of timing and degree. I thank Marshall Angeles for sending it...and the link is here.

The Senate endorsed stringent new sanctions on Iran's energy and shipping sectors in a fresh attempt to hobble the Islamic Republic's economy and hamper its nuclear ambitions.

Ignoring White House opposition spelled out just hours before the vote, the Senate voted 94-0 on Friday for a package of punitive measures that would end sales and transactions with various Iranian domestic industries.

The sanctions build upon penalties that Congress has passed — and President Barack Obama has implemented — that target Tehran's financial and energy sectors.

This AP new item showed up on the abcnews.go.com Internet site yesterday...and I thank Manitoba reader Ulrike Marx for sharing it with us. The link is here.

Since the late '90s, Japan's government has run a series of deficits while the central bank has kept interest rates at below zero through the liberal use of quantitative easing measures.

In fits and starts, the strategy has allowed Japan to remain afloat; however as the most recent trade deficit numbers make clear last week (a horrifying collapse in exports) and the travails of electronics giants Sony and Panasonic (both downgraded to junk credit rating last week by the Fitch agency), the path is nowhere near smooth; and indeed results appear to run counter to the best intentions of both Koo and by extension, Krugman.

At many levels, I have a deep admiration for the Japanese people; their work ethic, aesthetic values and personal discipline all set them apart from the globalized mainstream. Equally, a lot of people have called the death of Japan already; somehow the old lady didn't notice those obituaries and has continued to plod on despite all the deprivations that two decades of economic recession bring. A cat with the proverbial nine lives, in some ways.

Economics though is an unforgiving taskmaster, and eventually extracts change from the most obdurate societies. There are in particular a few specific factors that argue that the cat's nine lives are indeed up this time around.

This must read essay was posted over at the Asia Times website on Tuesday...and I've been saving it for today. I thank Roy Stephens once again...and the link is here.

It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.

President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn't. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came.

Instead, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, will form a club and leave out the United States. As 3 billion Asians become prosperous, interest fades in the prospective contribution of 300 million Americans - especially when those Americans decline to take risks on new technologies. America's great economic strength, namely its capacity to innovate, exists mainly in memory four years after the 2008 economic crisis.

This longish essay, with excellent charts, is another absolute must read from the Asia Times that was posted on their website earlier this week...and another contribution from Roy Stephens. The link is here.

Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula is dotted with thousands of caves that once housed prehistoric people and later became sacred to the Mayans. German archaeologists and filmmakers are currently involved in a project to explore with modern imaging technology and make a 3-D film of this underwater labyrinth.

A person died here hundreds of years ago. His body fell into the flooded cave and sank into the water. His flesh gradually separated from his bones. Today, he stares at divers out of empty eye sockets. His skull seems to be pushing its way out of the soil, as if he were trying to rise from the dead, to rise up from the sand, shake the tiresome sediment from his bones and escape from the silent darkness.

The others would probably want to follow him, because he isn't alone. The remains of more than 125 people lie in the Las Calaveras cenote. No one knows how and why the bodies got there, whether the people died at the same time or the bodies accumulated over the centuries.

This very interesting essay showed up on the spiegel.de Internet site yesterday...and it's Roy's final offering in today's column. The link is here.

You would probably not enjoy the galaxy NGC 1277. Never mind that it’s far — 220 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus. The problem is that at its center is a giant, giant black hole, 17 billion times as massive as our sun, so big that scientists calculate it makes up 59 percent of the mass of the galaxy’s disc.

Astrophysicists have long believed that there’s a black hole at the center of our Milky Way, but it probably accounts for something like 0.1 percent of the galaxy’s center. The one in NGC 1277, scientists report in today’s edition of the journal Nature, is the second largest they’ve ever observed, and it upends what they thought about how galaxies form.

What would you see if you lived on a habitable planet in that far-away galaxy and could look toward the center? Probably nothing that makes sense to human eyes. Black holes have such powerful gravity that they distort the space around them.

This is an amazing read...and the 2-minute embedded video is even more amazing to watch. It's a short piece...and well worth your time. It was posted on the abcnews.go.com Internet site early on Thursday afternoon Eastern time...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for bringing this fascinating article to our attention. The link is here.

There are two must read blogs with Eric Sprott. The first is headlined "Billionaire Eric Sprott - Gold to Rise 500% From Current Levels"...and the second is entitled "Shorts May Need to Deliver 40 Million Ounces of Silver". And lastly is this blog with Gerald Celente...and it bears the headline "Gold, Silver & the Top Trends for 2013".

November sales of U.S. American Eagle gold coins are set to be the strongest in 14 years as
uncertainty surrounding the U.S. fiscal crisis and the presidential election triggered safe-haven buying, dealers said.

Occasional sharp price swings during early and late November also boosted bullion coin buying by investors and speculators alike, coin dealers said.

"There is a huge influx of new high-net-worth individuals that are buying a lot of gold, and they are taking physical possession of it," said David Beahm, vice president of Blanchard & Co, one of the largest U.S. retail coin and bullion dealers.

Investors have so far this month bought 131,000 ounces of American Eagles produced by the U.S. Mint, more than triple last year's November sales...and marked the strongest November since 1998, data from the Mint's website shows.

Well, dear reader...I sure hope you're getting your share. This Reuters story was posted on their website during the New York lunch hour yesterday...and doesn't include the Friday's sales numbers that I reported further up in this column. It's a short read...and is definitely worth your time. I thank Elliot Simon for his last offering in today's column...and the link is here.

Last week the TF Metals Report blog posted an explanation by Andrew Maguire on how bullion banks use the GLD and SLV Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) to suppress the prices of gold and silver.

There are some mistakes in the article that need to be addressed lest they become more virally accepted "truths" in the precious metal blogosphere. Andrew also uses some terminology/jargon that readers may not be familiar with. I’ll cover both of these in the first section titled "Getting the facts straight".

With the facts established I’ll then seek to hopefully explain some of Andrew’s "mechanics" a bit more clearly. I think it is a combination of jargon, poor wording and the fact that Andrew talks about different transaction mechanics that results in this sort of comment from Ed Steer: "I haven't a clue as to what he's talking about" and Ed’s a smart guy who can follow an argument. This will be in the second section titled "Transaction mechanics".

Finally, I’ll discuss how significant the ETFs and the transaction mechanisms around them are to the market.

Despite Bron's yeoman efforts to 'clarify' what Andrew Maquire had to say...this is still enormously complicated and totally opaque to me. One look at the flow chart on page 3 of Bron's 13-page explanation should make any holder of shares in either GLD or SLV run screaming in stark terror...and if I were them, I would hit the bid at the open on Monday.

The flow chart looks like a Rube Goldberg machine crossed with G. Edward Griffin's "The Mandrake Mechanism". In his covering e-mail to me, Bron politely put it this way..."I think my 'ways to own gold' diagrams make the point about why ETFs are best avoided." I don't know about you, dear reader, but I think I said it better.

Bron's commentary was posted over at the perthmintbullion.com Internet site yesterday...and it's worth reading...but don't be surprised or disappointed if your eyes start to glaze over very early on. The link is here.

China’s gold market could get a boost from the debut of interbank trading on Monday, with analysts saying the move will enable traders to swap bullion in larger amounts and heighten the appeal of the metal as an alternative investment class.

Trades will be cleared and delivered under the auspices of the China Foreign Exchange Trading System, a subsidiary of China’s central bank, according to a Thursday statement by the Shanghai Gold Exchange.

Marking a further opening in China’s gold market, the new trading system is of particular benefit for mainland institutions that trade bullion in large volumes. China currently ranks as the world largest bullion market, accounting for a quarter of global demand.

This short marketwatch.com story was filed from Hong Kong on Friday...and it's worth skimming. I thank Marshall Angeles for his second and final offering in today's column...and the link is here.

A very similar story showed up in The Wall Street Journal yesterday as well...and the link to that is here.

This commentary from John was posted in the November issue of Investor's Digest of Canada...and like anything else John writes, this is a must read as well. I found it posted over on the sprott.com Internet site last evening...and the link is here.

Turkey late least week acknowledged that a surge in its gold exports this year is related to payments for imports of Iranian natural gas, shedding light on Ankara's role in breaching U.S.-led sanctions against Tehran.

In response, U.S. senators said they will seek to close this loophole. But a Turkish trade minister has warned Turkey will not respect any new U.S. measures.

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan admitted Turkey was paying for its gas imports with gold. While Washington has warned it is considering new measures to prevent such payments, Turkey's economy minister Zafer Caglayan this week dismissed the threat.

"The U.S. sanctions stand for the U.S.," Caglayan said. "We have multilateral international agreements. These deals we are a party to and are binding for us. But measures taken by the EU are also not binding since we are not a member," he said.

It's nice to see Turkey telling the U.S. government to stick it where the sun don't shine. This very interesting read includes a terrific photo...and excellent map. It's worth your time...and I thank Ulrike Marx for today's final story. The link is here.