The U.S. economy faces a recession if the nation goes off the fiscal cliff and key tax cuts fully expire at the end of this year, said Wilbur Ross, chairman and CEO of W.L. Ross and Co.

And, in the wake of news the U.S. will hit its debt limit earlier than expected, the billionaire financier warned that the United States could soon face its own “Greek” style debt situation.

Failure to stop automatic tax increases set for Jan. 1 “would obviously have a big negative effect on disposable income and consequently, I believe would put us back into the recession when coupled with the spending cuts that are also part of it," Ross told Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview Thursday.

The moneynews.com interview from Thursday comes in print form...or you can watch the embedded 11:08 minute video interview. It's certainly worth your time...and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for providing our first story of the day. The link is here.

From laundering money for Iran, to manipulating interest rates paid by consumers and businesses, to improperly foreclosing on homeowners, misdeeds cost the banks a record of more than $10.7 billion in fines this year.

When UBS agreed earlier this month to pay U.S. authorities $1.2 billion for manipulating Libor, it capped a record year for bank fines. And the total includes only what the banks paid to U.S. and state authorities, not billions more these global banks also agreed to pay European regulators.

Slightly more than half of the fines were related to improper mortgage practices, and most of that money was earmarked to provide help to the victims.

As I've stated many times in the past, these fines are just licensing fees...part of the cost of doing business. Until someone goes to jail, fines are a nuisance more than anything else. This cnn.com story was posted on their Internet site very early Thursday morning Eastern time...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for finding it for us. The link is here.

Andrew Neitlich is the last person you'd expect to be rattled by the stock market.

He once worked as a financial analyst picking stocks for a mutual fund. He has huddled with dozens of CEOs in his current career as an executive coach. During the dot-com crash 12 years ago, he kept his wits and did not sell.

But he's selling now.

"You have to trust your government. You have to trust other governments. You have to trust Wall Street," says Neitlich, 47. "And I don't trust any of these."

Defying decades of investment history, ordinary Americans are selling stocks for a fifth year in a row. The selling has not let up despite unprecedented measures by the Federal Reserve to persuade people to buy and the come-hither allure of a levitating market. Stock prices have doubled from March 2009, their low point during the Great Recession.

This long AP story was posted over at the npr.org Internet site on Wednesday...and is another contribution from Elliot Simon. The link is here.

In 2012, investors’ long-harbored suspicion that the stock market was a rigged game became something of a majority opinion.

This year, exasperation over the predominantly electronic mechanics of trading stocks, in which hyper-fast computer algorithms maneuver against one another for fractions of pennies collected over microseconds, boiled over. The level of disgust has gotten broad enough, in fact, that authorities might be prepared to rethink some of the basic rules and processes driving the system.

The opaque and complex structure for trading stocks electronically across dozens of exchanges and alternative networks has long been justified by industry leaders and regulators as the messy but logical result of investor-friendly reforms. Technology has enabled mind-melting speed, unfathomable communications capacity and brutal competition for order flow – all of which have made trading cheaper and faster than ever.

Yet by squeezing out traditional market makers who once collected low-risk, protected profits by mediating among buyers and sellers, rules and technology have tilted the power toward “high-frequency traders.” And in 2012, the fragility produced by so much layered complexity became too obvious, and produced too many market-jarring failures, to be considered merely the price of progress.

This story was posted on the Yahoo! Finance website on the day before Christmas...and I found it yesterday's edition of the King Report. It's worth skimming...and the link is here.

“Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.” Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, July 26, 2012

Having singlehandedly altered the course of the European crisis, the Financial Times named Mr. Draghi “FT Person of the Year.” Yet “Super Mario” was anything but acting alone. The emboldened Bernanke Fed soon followed Draghi’s bold pronouncement with its own daring commitment to open-ended quantitative easing (in a non-crisis environment!). All throughout 2012, extraordinary monetary easings were announced by central banks around the globe. I will this evening announce the distinguished 2012 “CBB Thing of the Year” recipient: congratulations to Endless Free “Money.”

In my Issues 2012 piece from early-January, I posited that 2012 was a “Bubble year.” The Bubble might burst, with an expanding European crisis as a probable catalyst. But if it persevered one could expect the potent Bubble to broaden and excesses to intensify. I referred to bipolar outcome possibilities – so-called left and right “tail risks.” With Spain’s 10-yr yields reaching 7.6% and Italy’s approaching 6.6% - along with the euro sinking to almost 1.20 to the dollar - in late-July, the European crisis was indeed spiraling out of control. Capital flight in/from Europe and the emerging markets was becoming a serious issue. A crisis of confidence in the European banking system was in the offing. The world economy was weakening rapidly, and the global Credit system was on the brink of a destabilizing bout of de-risking/de-leveraging.

Doug's year-end review is on the longish side, but his Friday missives are always must reads as far as I'm concerned...and this one is no different. I found it over on the prudentbear.com Internet site last evening...and the link is here.

Is the U.S. getting ready to wage the Cold War again? If one believes the critics, that’s the aim behind a planned $10 billion modernization of the B61 nuclear bomb, the backbone of the Pentagon’s tactical nuclear arsenal.

Actually, there are some other reasons for the upgrade: to reinforce global deterrence, to provide options against a range of future threats, and to make the U.S. stronger and safer. Achieving those goals is worth the money.

As wonderful as the idea of a world without nuclear weapons is, it isn’t going to be a reality any time soon. For now, the appropriate U.S. approach is to have the smallest arsenal possible, made up of weapons that will deter a weak rogue state -- think North Korea or Iran -- from developing a nuclear capability. Achieving this goal means working with Russia to get rid of as many intercontinental ballistic missiles as possible, while maintaining a small, but effective, core of tactical weapons that, with their limited fallout, could be used with great precision in combat.

The B61’s utility in this regard comes from its so-called dial-a-yield technology, meaning its explosive power can be set at a range of less than a kiloton to several hundred kilotons. (The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 had a yield of about 15 kilotons.) No other nuclear device comes close in terms of flexibility of reach, power and exactitude.

The Bloomberg editorial board posted this item on the bloomberg.com Internet site on Christmas Day...and I thank Marshall Angeles for sending it our way. It's a must read in my opinion...and the link is here.

The former European Commission president, who is credited as the architect of the modern EU and the euro, has broken ranks with other European leaders to offer Britain an exit from the Union.

"The British are solely concerned about their economic interests, nothing else. They could be offered a different form of partnership," he told Handelsblatt, a German financial newspaper.

"If the British cannot support the trend towards more integration in Europe, we can nevertheless remain friends, but on a different basis. I could imagine a form such as a European economic area or a free-trade agreement."

This story was posted on the telegraph.co.uk Internet site early Thursday afternoon...and it's courtesy of Roy Stephens. The link is here.

The war on cash in Sweden may be stalling. The anti-cash movement has been vigorously promoted by major Swedish commercial banks as well as the Riksbank, the Swedish central bank. In fact, for three of the four major Swedish banks combined, 530 of their 780 office no longer accept or pay out cash. In the case of the Nordea Bank, 200 of its 300 branches are now cashless, and three-quarters of Swedbank’s branches no longer handle cash. As Peter Borsos, a spokesman for Swedbank, freely admits, his bank is working “actively to reduce the [amount] of cash in society.”

The reasons for this push toward a cashless society, of course, have nothing to do with pumping up earnings from bank card fees or, more important, freeing fractional-reserve banks from the constraints of bank runs. No, according to Borsos, the reasons are the environment, cost, and security: ”We ourselves emit 700 tons of carbon dioxide by cash transport. It costs society 11 billion per year. And cash helps robberies everywhere.” Hans Jacobson, head of Nordea Bank, argues similarly: ”Our mission is to make people understand the point of cards, cards are more secure than cash.”

As you know, dear reader, the real reason lies elsewhere. This short essay showed up on the lewrockewell.com Internet site yesterday...and I thank Danish reader "Jan" for sending it our way. The link is here.

French President François Hollande has hailed 2013 as the year of the "great battle for jobs". But figures released Thursday show a rise in the jobless rate for the nineteenth consecutive month – and the forecast is for worse to come.

France's faltering economy shed a further 30,000 jobs in November, according to new figures released Thursday, pushing the unemployment rate to its highest level in almost 15 years.

The alarming data, although expected, is another blow to the country’s Socialist government and its president, who called earlier in the day for a collective “mobilisation” to deal with the ongoing employment crisis.

Roy Stephens found this story on the france24.com Internet site on Thursday...and the link is here.

Spain's property slump will deepen for much of the next decade, and tracts of buildings along the Mediterranean coast will have to be demolished, the country's top consultants have warned.

RR de Acuña & Asociados expects home prices in Madrid, Barcelona and other major cities to fall a further 30pc in a relentless slide until 2018, but it may be even worse in sunbelt regions where 400,000 Britons either live or own homes.

"The market is broken," said Fernando Rodríguez de Acuña, the group's vice-president. "We calculate that there are almost 2 million properties waiting to be sold. We have made no progress at all over the past five years in clearing the stock," he said.

This Ambrose Evans-Pritchard offering was posted on The Telegraph's website late Thursday afternoon GMT...and I thank Roy Stephens for his third offering in a row. The link is here.

On Wednesday, we reported that prosecutors from Greece's SDOE financial crimes unit had turned over the findings of a new probe into the infamous "Lagarde List" of alleged Greek tax evaders to parliament.

The big questions were what the probe would reveal when the findings were made public, and how damning they would be for the political party PASOK, a key partner in Greece's fragile ruling coalition that finds itself at the center of the unfolding scandal.

All of this comes at a time when Greece is involved with tense negotiations with international creditors at the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank in order to secure bailout loans it needs to keep the Greek economy afloat. The disbursement of the loans is contingent upon the current Greek government's ability to impose painful, unpopular austerity measures on the public.

Today...Thursday...there is an uproar in Greece over a report that Giorgos Papakonstantinou, a high-ranking PASOK official who served as Greece's finance minister from October 2009 to June 2011 (and was thus a key player in the euro crisis), deleted three names from the list.

This is another Roy Stephens article...and this one was posted on the businessinsider.com Internet site on Thursday morning. The link is here.

For the first time since the Velvet Revolution, citizens in the Czech Republic will have the opportunity to vote directly for their head of state in two weeks. Former Prime Minister Milos Zeman is in the pole position. His tough-talking style appeals to Czechs who are tired of back room deals and a scandal-plagued leadership.

Since the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the country's presidents have been chosen by the parliament in Prague. But in January, Czechs will elect their head of state directly for the very first time -- and that is good for Miloš Zeman. The candidate presents himself as a man of the people, coarse and direct. Polls show him in the lead, and it seems likely that he will end up in a run-off election against former Prime Minister Jan Fischer.

"I'm in favor of the EU, but against Brussels regulating things like toilets," Zeman says. If he wins, it will bring a different tone to Prague Castle. Poet-President Václav Havel, who was the first to hold the office after the collapse of communism, was given to moralizing speeches. His successor Václav Klaus, the incumbent who is approaching the end of his second term, has tended to be professorial in manner. Zeman, in contrast, is casual and provincial as a matter of principle.

This article showed up on the German website spiegel.de on Thursday...and it's courtesy of Roy Stephens as well. The link is here.

Russia has invited the head of the main Syrian opposition for talks.

The Associated Press reports that foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters today that he has officially contacted the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces through the Russian Embassy in Egypt.

The move is the most overwhelming sign yet that Russia's support for the Assad regime has deteriorated significantly. Russia has been Syria's most important ally in the conflict to date.

Although Moscow has not officially recognized the SNC as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people — as the U.S., U.K., and France have — the invitation signals that Russia recognizes the importance and influence that the coalition holds.

This businessinsider.com story from Thursday is a must read for all students of the "New Great Game"...and it is, of course, courtesy of Roy Stephens. The link is here.

Looting, feuds and divided loyalties threaten to destroy unity of fighters as war enters new phase.

It wasn't the government that killed the Syrian rebel commander Abu Jameel. It was the fight for his loot. The motive for his murder lay in a great warehouse in Aleppo which his unit had captured a week before. The building had been full of rolled steel, which was seized by the fighters as spoils of war.

But squabbling developed over who would take the greater share of the loot and a feud developed between commanders. Threats and counter-threats ensued over the following days.

Abu Jameel survived one assassination attempt when his car was fired on. A few days later his enemies attacked again, and this time they were successful. His bullet-riddled body was found, handcuffed, in an alley in the town of al-Bab.

This story was posted in The Guardian on Wednesday evening local time...and it's courtesy of Swiss reader B.G. for which I thank him. The link is here.

THIS is how wars usually start: with a steadily escalating stand-off over something intrinsically worthless. So don't be too surprised if the US and Japan go to war with China next year over the uninhabited rocks that Japan calls the Senkakus and China calls the Diaoyu islands. And don't assume the war would be contained and short.

Of course we should all hope that common sense prevails.

It seems almost laughably unthinkable that the world's three richest countries - two of them nuclear-armed - would go to war over something so trivial. But that is to confuse what starts a war with what causes it. The Greek historian Thucydides first explained the difference almost 2500 years ago. He wrote that the catastrophic Peloponnesian War started from a spat between Athens and one of Sparta's allies over a relatively insignificant dispute. But what caused the war was something much graver: the growing wealth and power of Athens, and the fear this caused in Sparta.

The analogy with Asia today is uncomfortably close and not at all reassuring. No one in 431 B.C. really wanted a war, but when Athens threatened one of Sparta's allies over a disputed colony, the Spartans felt they had to intervene. They feared that to step back in the face of Athens' growing power would fatally compromise Sparta's position in the Greek world, and concede supremacy to Athens.

This is a must read...and especially so for students of the "New Great Game". I thank Washington state reader S.A. for sending me this op-ed piece that was posted on theage.com.au Internet site on the day after Christmas. The link is here.

Nasty thunderstorms send most people running for shelter. Not Mitch Dobrowner. When bad weather starts brewing, the Long-Island born photographer goes chasing after it.

"Photographing a storm is something between a hybrid of shooting a landscape and shooting a sporting event," Dobrowner tell us.

It's not just about paying attention to all the things that make a good photograph — exposure, composition, and focus. It's about having fun "while all hell is breaking loose around me," Dobrowner says of the biggest challenge he faces on the job.

There are some stunning pictures...all black & white...contained in this photo essay that was posted on the businessinsider.com Internet site on Thursday. It has already had 75,000 plus views, so you just have to know that it's worth the trip. It's also courtesy of Roy Stephens...and the link is here.

A comet discovered by two Russian astronomers will be visible from Earth next year. Get ready for a once-in-a lifetime light show, says David Whitehouse.

At the moment it is a faint object, visible only in sophisticated telescopes as a point of light moving slowly against the background stars. It doesn't seem much – a frozen chunk of rock and ice – one of many moving in the depths of space. But this one is being tracked with eager anticipation by astronomers from around the world, and in a year everyone could know its name.

Comet Ison could draw millions out into the dark to witness what could be the brightest comet seen in many generations – brighter even than the full moon.

It was found as a blur on an electronic image of the night sky taken through a telescope at the Kislovodsk Observatory in Russia as part of a project to survey the sky looking for comets and asteroids – chunks of rock and ice that litter space.

If you're a space junkie like I am, this is an absolute must read. I heard about it when it was first discovered, as there was a short summary of the sighting posted over at spaceweather.com many months ago when it was way beyond the orbit of Jupiter. This is the first main stream media story I've seen about it...and I'm more than happy to post it here. How Ted Butler stumbled on it beats the heck out of me...but I got it from him on Thursday. It was posted on the independent.co.uk Internet site on that day...and the link is here.

The first blog shows six gold charts from Nick Laird's collection...and it's headlined "6 Shocking Gold Charts Depicting Stunning Western Decline". This next blog is with Egon von Greyerz. It's entitled "2013 - Financial Destruction & How Gold & Silver Will Perform". And lastly is Michael Pento...and it bears the headline "Man That First Spotted QE4 Now Says Gold to Break $10,000".

The CME, in a post-closing announcement, proceeded to hike outright margins on a variety of petroleum and freight products, but more importantly just cut the margins on gold by 9%.

Is it that time when the establishment is clearing the path for everyone to rotate out of equities (and/or bonds) into gold, just to set the trap and pull the trapdoor once everyone is once again left holding paper gold? We shall see, but following tonight's selloff, gold is now less than 5% less than stocks YTD. It may well be up to the last trading session of the year to determine who wins in 2012: rock or paper.

This very short piece showed up on the Zero Hedge website shortly after 5:00 p.m. Eastern time...and I thank Elliot Simon for spotting it. The link is here.

So-called Liberty Dollars, the creation of Bernard Von NotHaus and the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and the Internal Revenue Code, more commonly known by the acronym NORFED, will not be part of the April 24-27, 2013 74th Anniversary Convention of the Central States Numismatic Society in Schaumburg, Ill., according to a statement issued by convention General Chairman Kevin Foley.

“Although this alternative monetary instrument has been available on coin convention bourse floors since its 1998 introduction, and has from time to time been the subject of educational exhibit area displays, the 2011 federal court conviction of Mr. von NotHaus in connection with his role as what one numismatic press outlet characterized as the ‘monetary architect’ of the Liberty Dollar on the basis that the Liberty Dollar is counterfeit, has led us to adopt a policy to exclude such items from our bourse floor and educational exhibit area for our Schaumburg and future conventions,” Foley said.

This article showed up on the numismaticnews.net Internet site on the day after Christmas...and reader Elliot Simon was thoughtful enough to share it with us. The link is here.

Frank itemizes four of the most popular commentaries over the past year...and the precious metals is covered in Item 3...Love Trade Cools as Central Banks' Gold Demand Heats Up...which is a short scroll down from the top.

It was posted on the usfunds.com Internet site on Friday...and is courtesy of Elliot Simon...and it's his last offering in today's column. The link is here.

Police in the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao have arrested seven suspects in connection with the recent heist of 70 gold bars worth an estimated $11.5 million.

Police spokesman Reginald Huggins said Friday that one of the men is from Bonaire, three are from Venezuela and the remainder from Curacao. One of the suspects was later released while the others are still being interrogated, Huggins said.

One of the men arrested is the owner of a local jewelry store, while at least two other suspects were arrested at the jeweler's house.

The arrests occurred Thursday and come nearly a month after masked gunmen pretending to be police stole 476 pounds of gold bars from a fishing boat in Curacao.

This AP story was posted on the foxnews.com Internet site yesterday sometime...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for our final story in today's column. The link is here.