Paul Ryan addressed the fiscal cliff crisis on Tuesday, telling a Milwaukee radio host: “We’re nowhere. We’re farther than where we started.”

In an interview with 620 WTMJ host Charlie Sykes, the Wisconsin congressman and 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee said the fiscal cliff negotiations to stop automatic tax hikes and spending cuts at the end of the year “don’t really exist” because the White House won’t negotiate with Republicans.

“He took 40 minutes to reject the deal,” Ryan said of Obama’s dismissal of a compromise offered by Republicans on the fiscal cliff on Monday.

“That leads us to conclude he’s trying to get us to our fiscal cliff,” Ryan said. “He doesn’t want to come to the middle.”

This story was posted on The Daily Caller website on Tuesday...and I borrowed it from yesterday's edition of the King Report. The link is here.

Only a Fedzillacrat could possibly think raising taxes on the wealthy could accomplish anything toward restoring sanity in the financial insane asylum known as our federal government.

Let’s be honest; we are not close to going over the “fiscal cliff.” We drove off that cliff a long time ago. We can only hope the crash doesn’t demolish the republic.

Raising taxes on the wealthy, closing loopholes and eliminating deductions is analogous to seeing Michelangelo’s very first short paint stroke on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and claiming it’s a masterpiece.

We are more than $16 trillion in debt today, and estimates are that America will be $22 trillion in debt at the end of this president’s second term. If that’s not a certifiable, titanic financial disaster, someone please tell the American public what is.

This was posted on The Washington Times website on Monday...and is another item I stole from yesterday's King Report. It's a short must read...and the link is here.

It seems like it was only yesterday when we were praising the miraculous 4 sigma move in AAPL stock, when it soared by nearly $40 in one trading session. It wasn't: it was November 19. Which is why it probably shouldn't be surprising that two short weeks later AAPL stock has just seen its biggest dollar fall in absolute terms in history, down $37 dollars or nearly 7%, its biggest one-day percentage drop since September 2008. Why? Nobody really knows, but when the world's biggest company by market cap trades increasingly like a penny stock, does anyone really care?

In absolute terms, AAPL has lost nearly $35 billion in market cap in several hours today: more than the market cap of BlackRock, Morgan Stanley or Wal-Green, with no real material news except for the occasional weak order hearsay (which one didn't really need considering the US and global consumer is totally tapped out), and various other rumors. One thing is certain: the 240+ hedge funds who owned the stock as of September 30, and which did their best to paint the tape for November, are now at a complete loss what to do to delay what was certainly going to be a redemption avalanche for the second month in a row.

Here's a Zero Hedge story that reader U.D. just sent me...and you've read the important bits already...but the chart and the graph embedded in the story itself are worth the trip in and of themselves. The link is here.

The Federal Reserve is set to announce a fresh round of Treasury bond purchases when it meets next week, avoiding monetary policy tightening to maintain support for the weak U.S. economy amid uncertainty over the looming year-end "fiscal cliff."

Many economists think the U.S. central bank will announce monthly bond purchases of $45 billion after its policy gathering on December 11-12, signaling it will continue to pump money into the U.S. economy during 2013 in a bid to bring down unemployment.

"We expect status quo," said Laurence Meyer of the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers. "We expect purchases will continue at the same monthly rate as over the last three months; that the composition will be the same, and that the maturities distribution will be the same."

The decision would cement expectations that the Fed will keep buying a combined $85 billion of Treasuries and mortgage-backed bonds a month, while repeating that it expects to hold interest rates near zero until at least mid-2015.

Nothing really new here, but Reuters decided to make a story out of it yesterday anyway...and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for sending it our way. The link is here.

HSBC Holdings Plc might pay a fine of $1.8 billion as part of a settlement with U.S. law-enforcement agencies over money-laundering lapses, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The settlement with Europe's biggest bank - which could be announced as soon as next week - will likely involve HSBC entering into a deferred prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The potential settlement, which has been in the works for months, is emerging as a test case for just how big a signal U.S. prosecutors want to send to try to halt illicit flows of money moving through U.S. banks.

An HSBC spokesman said: "We are cooperating with authorities in ongoing investigations. The nature of discussions is confidential."

This Reuters story was posted on their website yesterday evening...and I thank Roy Stephens for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

EU finance ministers will return to Brussels on the eve of the December EU summit next week for last ditch talks on the controversial banking union proposals, after failing to reach agreement on Tuesday (4 December).

Speaking with reporters following the conclusion of talks, Vassos Shiarly, the Cypriot finance minister, said that agreement was very close. However, Articles 5, 19 and 27, which deal respectively with the role of national regulators, the composition and decision making processes for the new ECB supervisory board, and the timetable for implementing the rules, are still subject to further negotiation.

As expected, the question of the scope of the supervisory framework is at the centre of a Franco-German disagreement. France is keen for the entire 6,000 strong eurozone banking sector and for the legal framework to be rapidly implemented. Germany, meanwhile, is anxious to keep its regional savings banks outside the supervisory regime, with the ECB focusing only on overseeing the bloc's systemically important big banks.

This story was posted on the euobserver.com Internet site early yesterday morning...and I thank Roy once again for sending it. The link is here.

Forget the perfectly anticipated Greek (selective) default. This is the real deal. The Financial Times just released a blockbuster that Europe's most important and significant bank, Deutsche Bank, hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis, helping the bank avoid a government bail-out, according to three former bank employees who filed complaints to US regulators. US regulators, whose chief of enforcement currently was none other than the General Counsel of Deutsche Bank at the time!

Something tells me we aren't in Kansas anymore, Toto. This Zero Hedge story was posted on their website late yesterday evening...and the first reader through the door with it was 'David in California'. The link is here.

In an unsurprising headline, reflected by the marginal losses in EUR/USD since the news broke, the rating agency S&P has downgraded Greece's long-term debt rating to selective default from CCC. Greece is technically default.

This one paragraph story was posted on the fxstreet.com Internet site last evening...and you just read. The link to the hard copy is here...and I thank Elliot Simon for sending it.

Thousands of protesters marched on Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's palace on Tuesday in Cairo, forcing police to retreat after violent clashes. The opposition is celebrating the protest as a victory, but the bitter power struggle is far from over.

The battle on the outskirts of Egypt's presidential palace was brief but intense. It was a few minutes before 6 p.m. in the upscale Cairo suburb of Heliopolis when the acrid smell of tear gas came wafting through the streets once again, overcoming thousands of demonstrators in front of makeshift police barricades. Panic broke out immediately, with protesters -- among them a striking number of women -- quickly running from the notorious riot police, with their threatening-looking shields and batons. The officers repeatedly fired fresh canisters of tear gas into the crowd.

"You see!" screamed one young woman. "Morsi is firing on his own people just like Mubarak did."

This story showed up on the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for digging it up on our behalf. The link is here.

Four people have been killed and some 350 injured as clashes between supporters and opponents of Egypt’s president continue in Cairo. The escalating violence forced several top officials to resign, including the chief of the constitutional committee.

The Egyptian Health Ministry says that four people were killed in the clashes outside the presidential palace, with over 300 wounded across Cairo, Al Jazeera reports. The Egypt Independent reports that one woman and a teenager are among the dead.

According to the interior ministry, 32 people were arrested. Sporadic clashes continued through the night into Thursday morning.

Zaghloul El-Balshi, the general secretary of the supreme committee on the constitutional referendum, announced his resignation in a televised interview Wednesday night.

“I will not participate in a referendum that spilled Egyptian blood,” he said, as cited by Ahram Online. “I call on Morsi to cancel the constitutional declaration immediately.”

This Russia Today story was posted on their website late yesterday afternoon...and it's Roy Stephens' final offering in today's column. The link is here.

The first is with Louise Yamada...and it's headlined "Here are the Key Levels to Watch on Gold & Silver". The second is with Richard Russell. It bears the title "God, Gold, the Shanghai Index & the Dollar". The audio interview is with Dr. Stephen Leeb. There is one other KWN blog...but it's linked under its own headline further down.

A November 11th on-line article meant as satire indicating that U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner ordered the removal of Lincoln cents and Jefferson 5-cent coins from circulation beginning in January 2013 was picked up by an unknown number of online blogs and reposted as fact.

Henry Wallen, a staff writer for SkewNews.com, which published his original satirical article, posted a retraction at 7:45 p.m. Eastern Time Nov. 29 on the Sutori.com website.

Mary Lhotsky, deputy director of the U.S. Mint’s Office of Public Affairs, contacted Coin World on Nov. 29 about Wallen’s article in a damage-control effort to debunk the contents of the article.

“Nothing about the article is credible,” Lhotsky said Nov. 29.

Before Wallen had revealed that his article had been meant as satire, Lhotsky told Coin World that Geithner had not issued any directive seeking removal of Lincoln cents and Jefferson 5-cent coins from circulation.

Lhotsky said Nov. 29 that the Denver Mint and Philadelphia Mint are continuing to produce both denominations and will continue to do so until instructed otherwise.

If there ever was a case of "Monkey see...monkey do"...this was it. I figured that since Bill Buckler had posted it...it must be gospel. Well, it wasn't...and I had lots of readers tell me so yesterday. I thank reader Mike Overly for being the first of many to send me this must read article that was posted over at the coinworld.com Internet site on Monday...and the link is here.

Goldman commodity analyst Damien Courvalin is out with a big call: The top in gold is in.

The firm says that the primary driver of gold prices is real interest rates (which have been super-low in the United States, in part thanks to aggressive Fed easing) and that with the economy coming back, this era is coming to an end.

The essence of the call is boiled down to this chart, which compares gold prices to real interest rates (inverted). Given their expectation that real interest rates will rise, gold will follow the dotted line, and will decline the same way there was a decline in the 1980s.

You know when a criminal organization the size of the "Great Vampire Squid" is calling the top of a market, you should be buying with both hands. This story was posted on the businessinsider.com Internet site early yesterday morning...and it's courtesy of Elliot Simon. The link is here.

Financial letter writer Ron Rosen told King World News yesterday that Goldman Sachs' call for the end to the gold bull market is a perfect contrarian indicator. Rosen compares recent gold charts with charts from the gold bull market of the 1970s and sees great similarities. An excerpt from Rosen's interview is posted at the King World News website...and the link is here.

South Korea's central bank said on Wednesday it bought 14 tonnes of gold in November using its foreign reserves in order to spread its portfolio risks, while releasing data showing total reserves rose after talk of market intervention.

The Bank of Korea bought the gold for $780 million, the fourth purchase in about 1 1/2 years, lifting the proportion of gold in its total foreign reserves to 1.2 percent from the previous 0.9 percent, it said in a statement.

"Gold is a physical, safe asset and allows" the country "to deal with changes in the international financial environment more effectively," it said in a statement, without providing more details on the purchase.

Did they take physical delivery? Or is it just claims against a pile of gold bars in London and New York that they hope will never be asked for? This Reuters story was filed from Seoul yesterday...and I found it in a GATA release. The link is here.

GoldMoney's James Turk explains in a new audio interview why the world's above-ground gold inventory is likely much less than generally calculated and, perhaps more importantly, why gold is money rather than an investment -- but not a bad investment insofar as other forms of money are always depreciating.

I found 'all of the above' embedded in a GATA release yesterday. The interview is 20 minutes long...and it was posted at GoldMoney's Internet site on Monday. The link is here.

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress will ignore ratings company advice and call for an increase in mining taxes, said Enoch Godongwana, the party’s economic policy head.

The ANC must ensure the lives of poor black South Africans improve or risk giving an opportunity for populist leaders to stir up social unrest and erode the ANC’s dominance, Godongwana, who heads the ANC’s Economic Transformation Committee, said in an interview in Johannesburg yesterday.

“Unless we do some radical transformation, we’ll create fertile ground for an uncontrollable revolution,” he said.

With comments like this, their mining industry is on a one-way trip to oblivion. This Bloomberg story was posted on the mineweb.com Internet site yesterday...and I thank Manitoba Ulrike Marx for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) today announced that on December 5, 2012, it filed a civil injunctive enforcement action in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against Hunter Wise Commodities, LLC; Hunter Wise Services, LLC; Hunter Wise Credit, LLC; Hunter Wise Trading, LLC; Lloyds Commodities, LLC; Lloyds Commodities Credit Company, LLC; Lloyds Services, LLC; C.D. Hopkins Financial, LLC; Hard Asset Lending Group, LLC; Blackstone Metals Group, LLC; Newbridge Alliance, Inc.; United States Capital Trust, LLC; Harold Edward Martin, Jr.; Fred Jager; James Burbage; Frank Gaudino; Baris Keser; Chadewick Hopkins; John King; and David A. Moore. The complaint charges these entities and individuals with fraudulently marketing illegal, off-exchange retail commodity contracts. The complaint alleges that Hunter Wise Commodities, the orchestrator of the fraud, has taken in at least $46 million in customer funds since July 2011.

According to the CFTC complaint, the defendants claim to sell physical metals, including gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and copper, to retail customers in retail commodity transactions. Under the defendants’ retail commodity transactions investment contract, customers allegedly make a down payment on certain quantities of physical metals, usually 25 percent of the total purchase price. Defendants allegedly claim to arrange loans for the balance of the purchase price, and advise customers that their physical metals will be stored in a secure depository.

The complaint further alleges that these statements were false, and that the defendants do not purchase any physical metals, arrange loans for their customers to purchase physical metals, or arrange for storage of physical metals for any customers participating in their retail commodity transactions. Instead, all the transactions are just paper transactions, according to the complaint. Defendants allegedly do not own or sell metals to customers; customers are charged storage and insurance fees on metals that do not exist; and are charged interest on loans, which are never made by the defendants.

One has to wonder if charges of silver price manipulation will ever be leveled against JPMorgan and others...instead of these small fry. This was posted on the cftc.gov website yesterday...and I thank Bron Suchecki for pointing it out to me. The link is here.

Sprott Asset Management's chief investment strategist, John Embry, has joined the speaker roster for Cambridge House's Vancouver Resource Investment Conference January 20 and 21, 2013, and will attend GATA's fundraising cocktail reception at the conclusion of the conference, at which Bob Bishop, former editor of Gold Mining Stock Report, will come out of retirement to speak.

Other GATA-friendly speakers at the conference will include Al Korelin of the Korelin Economics Report, Peter Grandich of The Grandich Letter, David Morgan of Silver-Investor.com, David Franklin of Sprott Asset Management, Tom Calandra of The Calandra Report, Frank Holmes of U.S. Global Investors, newsletter writer Jay Taylor, GoldSeek.com's Peter Spina, and Ron Hera of Hera Research.

Representing GATA and speaking at the conference will be Chairman Bill Murphy, Board of Directors member Ed Steer, and your secretary/treasurer.

The link to the rest of the GATA release is here.

Interviewed for Gold Switzerland by Lars Schall on a broad range of economic subjects, the London Telegraph's international business editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, acknowledges both the legitimacy of questions about what Western central banks are doing in the gold market and the unlikelihood that those central banks will ever account for themselves in public. They certainly won't account for their gold market interventions if mainstream financial news organizations don't press them to do so, but then gold isn't on Evans-Pritchard's beat -- nor, it seems, really much on that of any mainstream financial journalist. Thus for years now specific questions about Western central bank gold activity have been left to GATA and Schall, who have established that such activity is both intense and more sensitive and secretive than the blueprints for nuclear weapons.

Once again I borrowed "all of the above" from a GATA release yesterday. I knew of this story early yesterday morning, but the hard copy hadn't been posted on Lars Schall's website, so it had to wait until today. The interview with Evans-Pritchard is headlined "Europe and America Will Not Allow Deflation to Take Root" and it's posted at Gold Switzerland website here. It's a must read.

Ned Naylor-Leyland, investment director of Cheviot Asset Management in London, interviewed by Max Keiser on yesterday's edition of "The Keiser Report" on the Russia Today television network, revealed that the British Broadcasting Corp.'s investigative journalism TV program, "Panorama," killed a report exposing silver market manipulation even after doing substantial interviews that provided evidence of manipulation.

Ned added that the failure of the mainstream news media to confront and expose it is what most sustains market manipulation.

Naylor-Leyland's segment of yesterday's "Keiser Report" begins at the 12:37 mark...and I thank Ontario reader Richard O'Mara for being the first through the door with this story yesterday. The link to this must watch interview is here.