JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. won a delay of Dodd-Frank Act requirements that they wall off some derivatives trades from bank units backed by federal deposit insurance.

Commercial banks including the Wall Street firms may get as long as an additional two years -- until July 2015 -- to comply with the rules, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said in a notice yesterday. The so-called push-out provision was included in the 2010 financial-regulation law as a way to limit taxpayer support for risky derivatives trades.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and other regulators need to complete swap rules to allow “federal depository institutions to make well-informed determinations concerning business restructurings that may be necessary,” the OCC said in the notice. Dodd-Frank requires that equity, some commodity and non-cleared credit derivatives be moved into separate affiliates without federal assistance.

Regulators including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke had opposed the provision, saying it would drive derivatives to less-regulated entities. In February, the House Financial Services Committee approved with bipartisan support legislation that would let banks keep commodity and equity derivatives in insured units by removing part of the rule.

Well, dear reader, it's a good bet that if all of those listed above were opposed to it, it was probably in the best interests of the investing public. This story showed up on the Bloomberg website early yesterday afternoon...and I thank Manitoba reader Ulrike Marx for our first story of the day. The link is here.

Fed mouthpieces Bullard and Lacker are out in force [yesterday] morning talking the market back from the edge of yesterday's FOMC Minutes and reassuring us that the economy is going to be weak enough for a lot longer to justify the Fed's actions. However, right at the end of Jim Bullard's interview with CNBC's Steve Liesman, we got a glimpse of the reality behind the curtain as the St. Louis Fed president threw Bernanke under the purge-ry perjury bus.

Following a discussion of fiscal policy uncertainty and the need to carefully spend what money we have, Liesman jokingly commented to Bullard that it is "Easy for you to say, you have a lot of dollars to spend; you get to print them!" To which the now foot-in-mouth Bullard replied, "Aaahh; indeed we do."

This short piece, along with an embedded CNBC video clip, was posted on the Zero Hedge website yesterday...and I thank Matthew Nel for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

Al Gore’s Current TV was never popular with viewers, but it was a hit where it counted: with cable and satellite providers. When he co-founded the channel in 2005, Mr. Gore managed to get the channel piped into tens of millions of households — a huge number for an untested network — through a combination of personal lobbying and arm-twisting of industry giants.

He called on those skills again after deciding in December to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera for $500 million. To preserve the deal — and the estimated $100 million he would personally receive — he went to some of those same distributors, who were looking for an excuse to drop the low-rated channel, and reminded them that their contracts with Current TV called it a news channel. Were the distributors going to say that an American version of Al Jazeera didn’t qualify, possibly invoking ugly stereotypes of the Middle Eastern news giant?

“The lawyers for the carriers couldn’t find their way around it,” said a person briefed on the negotiations who described them on condition of anonymity...and on Wednesday night, a deal was announced that will bring the Al Jazeera brand into at least 40 million homes in the United States. It will also make Mr. Gore, who is already estimated to be worth more than $100 million, an even richer man.

Gordon Gecko was probably right..."Greed is Good"...at least for the rich and well connected. This story was posted on The New York Times on Thursday...and it's Roy Stephens first offering of many in today's column. The link is here.

A federal judge issued a 75-page ruling on Wednesday that declares that the US Justice Department does not have a legal obligation to explain the rationale behind killing Americans with targeted drone strikes.

Siding with the defendants in what can easily be considered as cloaked in skepticism, Judge McMahon writes that the Obama White House has been correct in refusing the FOIA requests filed by the plaintiffs.

"There are indeed legitimate reasons, historical and legal, to question the legality of killings unilaterally authorized by the Executive that take place otherwise than on a 'hot' field of battle," McMahon writes in her ruling. Because her decision must only weigh whether or not the Obama administration has been right in rejecting the FOIA requests, though, her ruling cannot take into consideration what sort of questions — be it historical, legal, ethical or moral — are raised by the ongoing practice of using remote-controlled drones to kill insurgents and, in these instances, US citizens.

"The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable Catch-22,” she writes. “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reason for their conclusion a secret.”

This article showed up on the Russia Today website early Thursday morning Moscow time...and is an absolute must read. I thank Roy Stephens for sending it...and the link is here.

These days, there are few things to admire about the socialist, bankrupt and culturally degenerating USA, but at least so far, one thing remains: the right to bear arms and use deadly force to defend one's self and possessions.

This will probably come as a total shock to most of my Western readers, but at one point, Russia was one of the most heavily armed societies on earth. This was, of course, when we were free under the Tsar. Weapons, from swords and spears to pistols, rifles and shotguns were everywhere, common items. People carried them concealed, they carried them holstered. Fighting knives were a prominent part of many traditional attires and those little tubes criss-crossing on the costumes of Cossacks and various Caucasian peoples? Well those are bullet holders for rifles.

Various armies, such as the Poles, during the Смута (Times of Troubles), or Napoleon, or the Germans even as the Tsarist state collapsed under the weight of WW1 and Wall Street monies, found that holding Russian lands was much, much harder than taking them and taking was no easy walk in the park but a blood bath all its own. In holding, one faced an extremely well armed and aggressive population Hell bent on exterminating or driving out the aggressor.

This well armed population was what allowed the various White factions to rise up, no matter how disorganized politically and militarily they were in 1918 and wage a savage civil war against the Reds. It should be noted that many of these armies were armed peasants, villagers, farmers and merchants, protecting their own. If it had not been for Washington's clandestine support of and for the Reds, history would have gone quite differently. [Emphasis mine. - Ed]

This is a must read for all Americans in general...and all students of the "New Great Game". Washington's support for the Communists during the revolution is covered in G. Edward Griffin's classic tome..."The Creature From Jekyll Island". It was posted on the pravda.ru Internet site on December 28th...and I thank reader U.D. for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

Switzerland's oldest bank is to close after pleading guilty to helping some of the US's richest people evade paying taxes on at least $1.2bn (£750m) which was hidden in secret offshore accounts.

Wegelin, which was founded in 1741, said it would "cease to operate as a bank" after it admitted it had allowed 100 US taxpayers to hide their money.

The bank agreed to pay $57.8m in fines and restitution to the US authorities after admitting to conspiracy charges related to helping US taxpayers living overseas evade payments to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for almost a decade.

This short article showed up on the guardian.co.uk Internet site yesterday afternoon GMT...and I thank Swiss reader B.G. for sharing it with us. The link is here.

It's been a busy day at the market in downtown Volos. Angeliki Ioanitou has sold a decent quantity of olive oil and soap, while her friend Maria has done good business with her fresh pies.

But not a single euro has changed hands – none of the customers on this drizzly Saturday morning has bothered carrying money at all. For many, browsing through the racks of second-hand clothes, electrical appliances and homemade jams, the need to survive means money has been usurped.

"It's all about exchange and solidarity, helping one another out in these very hard times," enthused Ioanitou, her hair tucked under a floppy felt cap. "You could say a lot of us have dreams of a utopia without the euro."

This article was posted on The Guardian website early on Wednesday afternoon GMT...and it's courtesy of Marshall Angeles. The link is here.

Consider it a mea culpa submerged in a deep pool of calculus and regression analysis: The International Monetary Fund’s top economist today acknowledged that the fund blew its forecasts for Greece and other European economies because it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth.

The new and highly technical paper looks again at the issue of fiscal multipliers – the impact that a rise or fall in government spending or tax collection has on a country’s economic output.

That it comes under the byline of fund economic counselor and research director Olivier Blanchard is significant. Fund research is always published with the caveat that it represents the views of the researcher, not the institution itself. But this paper comes from the top, and attempts to put to rest an issue that has been at the center of debate about how fast countries should move in their efforts to tame large debts and deficits.

If fiscal multipliers are small, countries can cut spending faster or raise more in taxes without much short-term damage. If they are large, then the process can become self-defeating, at least in the short run, with each dollar of government spending cuts, for example, costing the economy more than a dollar in lost output and thus actually increasing debt-to-GDP ratios.

They didn't need to publish a fancy research paper to prove that. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been saying that for as long as I can remember...and he's certainly not alone in that department. The IMF now has a keen grasp of the obvious. Let's see what they do now. I thank Ulrike Marx for her second story in today's column. It appeared on The Washington Post's website during the Thursday lunch hour...and the link is here.

The International Monetary Fund, at long last, has begun to open up. Gone are the days when it acted as a handmaiden of Western, mainly US, economic orthodoxy. It is even throwing a gauntlet down to the mighty US Federal Reserve, questioning the effects its constant monetary boosting has had on the rest of the world.

Given that the IMF is the key arbiter on many key issues of global finance and economics, and hence also over global fairness and equity, the change should be greatly welcomed. Over the past decade, the reform debate had centred mainly on giving emerging market economies more voting power, by commensurably reducing the voting shares of the "rich" world.

Given the global economic dynamics, the adjustment was of course long overdue. One clear indication is that the IMF's senior-level staff members have become much less American and less European. But now, the first substantive consequence of these shifts are beginning to emerge.

This story appeared on the asianewsnet.net Internet site yesterday...and international capital controls are discussed. It's worth your time, if you have it...and it's also Ulrike Marx's third offering in today's column. The link is here.

The end will justify the means to unite the Islamic peoples into a world of virtue and prosperity to where the Muslim Brotherhood says that it will bring them. Egypt is their launching platform. The entire Islamic world is their objective.

If they were running for office in the United States or any European country on their economic platform of job creation, the sanctity of private property, and a social safety net, they will likely win. It all sounds perfect. Then, you learn that you have just voted for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Members of the movement come from the upper levels of Egyptian society. They are the businessmen, doctors, university professors, military officers, and other professionals. Over their eighty four year history, they have infiltrated every area of government, education, and industry.

If its economic policies are all there is about the movement, it would pose no threat in the public mind. What does frighten so many is the secrecy that shields the organization from scrutiny and the negative propaganda spread by worried authoritarian regimes. Under such circumstances, it is understandable that the attacks by various governments would have forced the Brotherhood to protect itself beneath a cloak of secrecy.

Roy Stephens sent me this essay...and it's another must read for students of the "New Great Game". It was posted over at the oilprice.com Internet site on Wednesday...and the link is here.

Tensions between the United Arab Emirates and the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamist movement, do not appear to be easing in the new year.

On January 1, Emirati newspaper Al Khaleej reported that authorities in the Gulf state had arrested 10 members of an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood cell. “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has conducted many courses and lectures for the members of the secret organisation regarding the election and the ways of changing regimes in Arab countries,” the paper said.

The suspects are accused of holding “secret meetings” in the Emirates, recruiting “Egyptian expats in the UAE to join their ranks”, and raising “large amounts of money which they sent illegally to the mother organisation in Egypt”. The article also alleged that the suspects collected classified information regarding matters of UAE defence.

So, the game has obviously already begun...and it's another must read for students of the "New Great Game". Not surprisingly, it's another offering from Roy Stephens...and it was posted on the france24.com Internet site yesterday. The link is here.

Japan is in dire straits. Its economy recently entered its fifth economic recession in 15 years, and Beijing's claims to the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands proved more serious and costly last year than in any other time since the end of the Second World War. In addition, the recovery effort following the disastrous earthquake and tsunami in 2011 remains a monumental administrative and economic burden. Despite these daunting challenges, the political environment in Japan has been plagued by endemic indecision.

The result of the December general elections revealed that the hope invested by the electorate in the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has been exhausted. Since taking power in 2009, the DPJ's greatest accomplishment was arguably the deal between the Yoshihiko Noda administration and the now-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to double the consumption tax in exchange for an early election.

Despite the mandate that Shinzo Abe and the LDP won in the House of Representatives as a result of that early election (taking 294 seats out of 480), the fundamental problem that rendered the past three DPJ administrations ineffective remains in place.

This essay was posted on the Asia Times website early Saturday morning in Hong Kong...and it's also courtesy of Roy Stephens. The link is here.

The United States and China have completed their respective leadership transitions. Now the two powers can begin developing their ever-transforming relationship in an atmosphere of (relative) domestic political stability. Last year brought about important changes to the Sino-American dynamic - most notably the US's much-heralded "pivot" to Asia. The Chinese leadership is increasingly vocal regarding perceived US interference in China's strategic front yard. The major trends in the relationship will continue in 2013, although there are some potentially destabilizing developments afoot.

The US military "pivot" towards Asia, and American backing for Japan in the territorial dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands are causing serious and open strains.

Compounding these new sources of tension is a longest-standing disagreement over American weapons sales to the government of Taiwan. The stage is set for a period of increasing - and increasingly open - confrontation between the United States and China in 2013.

Another must read for all students of the "New Great Game"...and my thanks to Roy Stephens once again. It was posted on the Asia Times website early Saturday morning as well...and the link is here.

On New Year's Day, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called for a "radical" economic renewal for his country and an end to decades of conflict with South Korea. Now, a German media report says he is moving quickly to fulfill at least the first pledge.

According to an article to be published on Saturday by the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the communist regime in Pyongyang is preparing to open up the country's economy to foreign investors. Moreover, it has enlisted the assistance of German economists and lawyers to lay the groundwork for the move.

"There is a master plan," one of the economists involved in the plan told the paper. "They want to open up this year." The FAZ did not identify the economist, but noted that he works at a respected German university and that he had advised other governments in Asia in the past.

This short article was posted on the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and I thank Roy once again for sharing it with us. The link is here.

3-D printing technology, used industrially for the last few decades, is poised to break into the mass market. Its endless and swiftly developing possibilities -- from entrepreneurial manufacturing to the potential sculpting of human organs -- could become the next industrial revolution.

When the TV series Star Trek first brought the starship Enterprise into German living rooms, the concept of a replicator was pure science fiction, a fantastical utopian vision we might experience one day centuries in the future. Replicators, something of a mixture between computer and miniature factory, were capable of creating food and replacement parts from next to nothing. They were highly practical devices, since Captain Kirk couldn't exactly take along a lot of supplies for his journeys through outer space. That futuristic vision, though, has receded far into the past -- overtaken by the present.

The real-world replicator-like technology poised to revolutionize the world is known as 3-D printing, though that term is misleading, since the process has little to do with printing. Three-dimensional printers can be as small as a suitcase or as large as a telephone booth, depending on the object they are meant to faithfully replicate from a 3-D computer blueprint. Inside the machine, the product is assembled by stacking extremely thin layers of material on top of one another, sort of like reassembling an apple that has been cut into super-fine slices.

I've been following this technology for a while...and had a hard time believing it, even when I saw it. But, it's the real deal. This fascinating 2-page essay about it appeared on the spiegel.de Internet site yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for digging it up on our behalf. The link is here.

The first is with James Turk...and it's headlined "A Black Swan Event, Global Monetary Reset & Chaos". The next blog is with Art Cashin. It bears the title "2013 Predictions, Warnings & Outlook". Lastly is this interview with Eric Sprott...and it's entitled "Fed has no Exit Plan & There is no Exit"

I can't believe the number of readers that sent me this story over the last few days. This has gone viral on the Internet...and it's being talked about even in a lot of main stream media outlets that normally wouldn't touch this sort of thing with a 20-foot barge pole.

Is it for real? I wouldn't bet a nickel on it...and I have no idea what's in the Kool-Aid everyone is drinking, as it sounds like b.s. to me...but it has developed a life of its own. If there was a grain of truth to all this, the platinum price would have blown sky high already...which it hasn't. I have four stories on this...and they're linked here, here, here...and here. And once you've read them, take two blue pills and call me in the morning.

Gold plunged over 3 percent yesterday after the release of FOMC minutes, which revealed that several members of the Fed wanted to end QE3 by the end of 2013.

Now, Dennis Gartman, publisher of The Gartman Letter, writes that gold bugs who have operated on the thesis that the Fed has lost control of money supply are in tatters.

"Commodity prices are falling and in some instances are falling quite sharply. Clearly that is the case with gold, for the minutes of the FOMC’s last meeting have shaken the hopes of the most violent “Gold Bugs” malevolently, and have shaken our gold position rather materially. We are, however, rather nicely insulated from the real damage being done to the simplistic gold bugs who have owned and who still own gold predicated upon their thesis that the Fed has lost control of the money supply. That thesis is now in tatters... or at least has been very badly torn in the past twenty four hours... following the single sentence from the Fed’s minutes noted at length above.

Dennis, the full moon was on December 28th. I can't believe anyone takes this guy seriously when he's talking about anything...especially gold. He, like Jon Nadler and Jeff Christian, have been mostly bearish all the way up during this 12-year bull market in the precious metals. He's very familiar with GATA's work...and knows better. If there ever was a contrarian indicator, Mr. Gartman's comments surely fit the bill. You should be buying with both hands when he's talking trash like this.

This article, if you can bear to read it, was posted on the businessinsider.com Internet site yesterday morning Eastern time...and I thank Roy Stephens for his final offering in today's column. The link is here.

Jim Sinclair wrote to a Comrade in Golden Arms yesterday:

"Have you ever considered how bad it must be out there if the Fed and gold banks are working so hard to paint gold bearish and the U.S. dollar bullish? It must be fundamentally the worst of the various economic crises in my more than 50 years in gold.

"There has never been this level of effort on all fronts to discredit gold. That must reflect the dire condition of the balance sheets of the Western world's financial industry. Anyone with eyes in their head can see this move has been contrived. In my opinion profit on the short side is a secondary motive."

I found this commentary in a GATA release yesterday. Sinclair's commentary is headlined "Jim's Mailbox" and it's posted at JSMineSet here.

Turkey's gold exports rose nearly 800 percent last year on the back of soaring sales to Iran and the trade will continue, despite tightening U.S. sanctions on Tehran, Turkey's economy minister said on Friday.

Turkish gold exports rose to $12.7 billion in the first eleven months of 2012 compared to the $1.47 billion exported in the whole of the previous year, Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan told a briefing in Istanbul.

Around half of the exports - $6.5 billion worth - went to Iran, while $4.2 billion went to the United Arab Emirates. Turkey exported just $54 million worth of gold to Iran in 2011.

This very short must read Reuters story was filed from Istanbul yesterday morning around 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. I thank Ulrike Marx for her final contribution to today's column...and the link is here.

Friday's commentary by GoldCore in Dublin notes the usual counterintuitive action with the gold price and raises the possibility of market manipulation.

"Bullion banks with large concentrated short positions," GoldCore says, "are using the pretext of the Federal Reserve minutes to manipulate the price lower, both to profit and to allow them to close out their significant short positions at more advantageous prices and possibly even go long.

...Gold has broken below the December low of $1,635/oz and below the 50-, 100-, and 200-day moving averages. However, technical analysis should be ignored in favour of fundamental analysis given that there are strong grounds for suspecting that the gold and silver markets are subject to manipulation by certain banks in the same way that interest rates were in the LIBOR manipulation."

I didn't see attribution given to Ted Butler [or GATA] in this article...as I'm sure he didn't come up with the words "large concentrated short positions" on his own.

But, he's speaking the unvarnished truth...so I guess we should be grateful for that. This commentary was posted over at the goldcore.com Internet site yesterday...and it's a must read. I found it embedded in a GATA release yesterday...and the link is here.