The U.S. Treasury Department will begin taking steps on Friday to delay hitting the government's $16.4 trillion borrowing limit on Dec. 31st.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a letter Wednesday to congressional leaders that the department will use accounting measures to save approximately $200 billion. That could keep the government from reaching the limit for about two months.

The move comes as President Barack Obama and the GOP congressional leadership resume negotiations over how to avoid a series of tax increases and spending cuts, known as the "fiscal cliff," that are scheduled to take effect in the new year.

Obama has sought to include an increase in the borrowing limit in any agreement to avoid the cliff. But Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders have demanded concessions in return. The negotiations hit a stalemate last week. Obama and lawmakers are returning to Washington this week to try again.

This AP article was picked up by the finance.yahoo.com Internet site yesterday...and I thank Scott Pluschau for today's first story. The link is here.

The American home mortgage market has, for all practical purposes, become nationalized since the 2008 financial meltdown, according to an analysis by ProPublica, the non-profit investigative journalism project.

The takeover, without which the housing market could barely function, has occurred against a backdrop of little planning or public discussion.

In fact, nine out of every 10 new mortgages are now backed by the U.S. taxpayer, up from three in 10 in 2006.

This item was posted on the moneynews.com Internet site last Friday...and it's courtesy of West Virginia reader Elliot Simon. The link is here.

The officials supervising the wind-down of MF Global’s remains said on Saturday that they had reached a broad settlement over claims among the entities they oversee.

The trustees representing the failed firm’s main brokerage arm and its holding company, James W. Giddens and Louis J. Freeh, agreed to settle claims with the administrators of MF Global’s London arm.

The deal means that an estimated $500 million to $600 million will be returned to MF Global’s brokerage unit, which has been paying back customers. Mr. Giddens had previously sought to take back about $700 million from the London unit.

The CME Group should have made MF Global's customers whole the day after this happened, but didn't. This fits in nicely with the fact that the CME is up to their necks in the silver price management scheme as well. This article showed up on The New York Times website on Saturday...and I thank Phil Barlett for sending it. The link is here.

Over an early-morning coffee with the chief executive of a FTSE 100 business last week, talk turned to the outlook for 2013. Where I had expected some guarded optimism, instead I heard a chilling analysis.

The CEO said he had been reading a new paper from Boston Consulting Group headed “Ending the Era of Ponzi Finance”. The lessons he had taken from it were miserable. [The report appears to be free, but you have to sign up for it. - Ed]

The BCG study by Daniel Stelter which is doing the rounds of corporate C-suites does not pull its punches. In fact, its punches are really just a softening-up exercise for a barrage of kicks and painful blows aimed at anyone who thinks that kicking the can down the road is a suitable substitute for radical action.

The West was not going to find its way to the right economic path with a little tweaking at the edges, the CEO said. What is needed is a wholesale overhaul of the economic system to tackle record levels of public and private debt. Was anyone brave enough to do it, he wondered aloud.

This commentary, plus the link to the report, was posted on the telegraph.co.uk Internet site late on Saturday evening BST...and it's courtesy of Nick Laird. The link to 'all of the above' is here.

Is French President François Hollande a reformer or a traditional leftist? He's a man who enjoys his role as France's leader, but many voters are asking themselves who it is they elected. He's a staunch opponent of Angela Merkel's austerity measures and has made combating them a priority. His true political agenda may only become apparent as the euro crisis continues.

François Hollande has been speaking for two hours and 37 minutes, from his place at the podium in the grand ballroom of the Elysée Palace. It is mid-November, and this is the French president's first press conference since taking office. He hasn't yet even broken a sweat.

Hollande evokes the economic situation in France in a dramatic tone and reports a laundry list of measures he is either considering or has already implemented. Then he answers the journalists' questions, all delivered in a deferential tone and some of them equally as flowery as the president's answers. At one point Hollande says, "And now I will answer another question no one has asked." He's allowed to do that.

This is a fascinating moment for two reasons. For one thing, it shows how France's presidential democracy works. Hollande's press conference is not really a press conference, but rather a symbolic performance that demonstrates the president's authority.

You couldn't make this stuff up. The story was from the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and the first of two in a row from Roy Stephens. The link is here.

Athens has collected just half the tax debts and conducted less than half the audits it was supposed to under the targets set by its lenders, according to a survey by the country's international lenders which was compiled in November.

The lenders urged Greece to improve tax collection and focus on the cases most likely to produce results. "Doctors and lawyers are a good place to start," they said.

Tax evasion is endemic in Greece, making it more difficult for the government to shore up its finances under its €240bn international bailout.

This story, which is worth skimming, was posted on The Telegraph's website early Monday afternoon local time and, as mentioned above, is the second of two in a row from Roy Stephens. The link is here.

Incoming Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe kept up his calls on Tuesday for the Bank of Japan to drastically ease monetary policy by setting an inflation target of 2 percent, and repeated that he wants to tame the strong yen to help revive the economy.

"We have advocated beating deflation, correcting the strong yen and achieving economic growth during the election, so we must restore a strong economy," he said, adding that the stagnant economy was also undermining Japan's diplomatic clout.

Abe, a security hardliner was sworn in as premier on Wednesday...and he is also expected to appoint his cabinet, is prescribing a mix of aggressive monetary policy easing and big fiscal spending to beat deflation and rein in the strong yen.

Print...or die! The disease is now terminal in the Western world. This Reuters story was filed from Tokyo on Christmas Day...and I found it in yesterday's edition of the King Report. The link is here.

1. John Embry: "Catastrophic Loss of Confidence to Spike Gold & Silver". 2. Michael Pento: "Who Has Been Naughty or Nice & What to Expect in 2013". 3. Andrew Maguire: Audio interview Part One. 4. Andrew Maguire: Audio interview Part Two. 5. Audio interview with Gerald Celente. 6. Audio interview with Egon von Greyerz. 7. Richard Russell: "Put 33% to 50% into Gold & Sidestep Bubbles".

Sprott Asset Management's chief investment strategist, John Embry, will be master of ceremonies for GATA's fundraising reception with retired newsletter writer Bob Bishop at the conclusion of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference on Monday, January 21.

Embry, known worldwide for his advocacy of ownership of the monetary metals and the companies that mine them, is a longtime GATA supporter and will be speaking during the Vancouver conference as well.

Bishop, retired editor of the Gold Mining Stock Report newsletter, spoke at GATA's Washington conference in 2008 and his expertise long has been sought by thousands in the precious metals sector.

You can read the rest of this GATA post at the gata.org Internet site...and the link is here.

In a video posted this week at GoldMoney's Internet site, GoldMoney founder and GATA consultant James Turk reviews and elaborates on the forecast for gold he made in Forbes magazine in 2003, explaining why he still thinks the gold price will reach $8,000 by 2015. Currency debasement, Turk notes, is both policy and compelling politics in the West, and the long-term charts he presents prove it. Turk's presentation is titled "James Turk's Outlook for Gold for 2013 to 2015".

I borrowed 'all of the above' from a GATA release on Saturday...and the link is here.

Interviewed by Lars Schall for GoldSwitzerland, GoldMoney research director and economist Alasdair Macleod explains why he thinks the New York Commodities Exchange will default on its silver contracts and why central banks put themselves in great jeopardy when they start being candid about their gold reserves.

Alasdair makes this grand statement about a Comex closure in silver...but then just leaves it lay there without further explanation...and I'll have more on that in the next story. This Macleod/Schall interview was posted on the goldswizerland.com Internet site on Saturday...and the link is here.

As you can see from the above headline, this 'Close the Comex' issue is nothing new. And as I've said countless times, there's nothing about silver that hasn't already been advanced by Ted Butler long before I, or anyone else, could even dream this stuff up.

Ted re-visited this issue within the last six weeks in one of his commentaries to his paying subscribers...and I've mentioned it a time or three in my own column over the years, but even these comments were based on what Ted had said almost a decade prior. Please keep this sort of thing in mind when you're reading the latest silver 'expert' out there.

The difference between my 'expert' advice...and others 'expert' advice on silver is that I acknowledge the source, where others just steal his stuff without attribution. I also note that large chunks of what GATA has dug up over the years is now starting to appear as sage commentary from other gold 'experts'...also without attribution. It's unacknowledged theft...but theft nonetheless.

Here's Ted's gold commentary from 9+ years ago. If the story line sounds suspiciously familiar, it's because the story hasn't changed during the intervening years. The only real differences are that the concentration is now extreme...and we know the identities of the two largest silver shorts. This is an absolute must read...and the link is here.

It's going to be a while before I can write up a full new post so, with the current post pushing 40,000 views, I thought I'd better give you a new thread to chew on overnight.

Following along with the previous post here at TFMR, Uncle Ted crafted these two paragraphs in his Weekly Review back on Saturday. Concise but with an added level of detail I failed to provide, these two paragraphs provide an essential background to the entire silver manipulation story.

I hope that Uncle Ted doesn't mind. He's the patriarch of our movement and, as you know, I hold him in very high regard. I would strongly encourage you to consider subscribing to his site, especially at this critical moment in our history.

Since Mr. Ferguson already 'stole' this from Ted...and it's in the public domain...I'm only too happy to steal it as well. It, too, is an absolute must read...and it's posted on the tfmetalsreport.com Internet site. The link is here.

Iraq has joined the growing list of countries buying gold for their official reserves, purchasing more than 25 tonnes of the precious metal in the market to beef up the gold reserves of its central bank for the first time in years.

The purchases by Baghdad come as Iran is using gold as a currency to settle import-export transactions with neighbouring countries, including Turkey. But Iraq has so far not disclosed any gold transaction with Tehran.

Analysts said it was unclear whether the purchases showed dealings with Iran or were simply a sign that the Iraqi central bank is diversifying its foreign exchange reserves, as others in emerging countries have done recently.

This story showed up in the Financial Times of London on Friday...and it's posted in the clear in this GATA release. The link is here.

Lord Padmanabha, the presiding deity of Thiruvananthapuram, also known as Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala, who is depicted as reclining on a gigantic snake, Anantha, suddenly went up in the estimation of his devotees recently, when it was discovered that he has an inestimable treasure of gold in his custody.

Kerala values nothing more than gold, and it is comforting for the people of the state to know that their erstwhile rulers too had a fascination for the yellow metal, which they stored in the temple as an offering and as an insurance against famine. The innumerable jewelry shops around the temple and elsewhere in Kerala may be handling as much gold as the temple has accumulated. "God's Own Country" is fast becoming "Gold's Own Country."

With only 3 percent of India's population, Kerala gobbles up 20 percent of the country's gold every year, and the World Gold Council estimates that India, the largest consumer of gold in the world, consumes 30 percent of the global supply. Two hundred thousand people are employed in the gold industry in this tiny state. Such is the love of gold in Kerala that there may be no household without some gold, tucked away as savings, either to be given away as wedding gifts for daughters or to raise cash by way of gold loans or outright sale.

This is another must read story. This blog/story was posted on The New York Times website the day before Christmas...and I found it in a GATA release yesterday. The link is here.

Phil Streible spends a minute or so telling viewers why silver is his number one pick. But unspoken in this Bloomberg interview from December 24th is the fact that RJ O'Brien is an insider in the silver market. If they aren't part of the '5 through 8' silver traders on the Comex...they are certainly one of Ted Butler's raptors. I would be prepared to bet a few dollars that he's placing his bets on the basis of insider information...although he looks far to young to be a "senior analyst" of anything... ;-)

The 4:40 minute video interview was posted on the bloomberg.com Internet site on the day before Christmas...and I thank Matthew Nel for digging this story up for us. It's definitely worth watching...and the link is here.

Sprott Asset Management CEO Eric Sprott muses on the extraordinarily greater demand for silver [must it carry the adjectives "real" or "physical"?] than for gold, wonders how long the paper markets will be able to continue to suppress the silver price, but concludes that buying silver when demand is so disproportionate to production is a good idea.

Eric's Markets at a Glance commentary for December is titled "Why Are [Smart] Investors Buying 50 Times More Physical Silver than Gold?" and it's posted at the Sprott.com Internet site. The link is here...and it's a must read as well.