Golden Minerals Company

August brought no increase in the number of jobs in the United States, a signal that the economy has stalled and that inaction by policy makers carries substantial risk.

The government report on hiring, released on Friday, prompted another round in a relentless diminution of economic expectations. The unemployment rate, at 9.1 percent, did not change last month, and the White House said it was expected to stay that high through at least 2012.

This story came from yesterday's edition of The New York Times...and is courtesy of Roy Stephens. The link is here.

Factory activity worldwide stalled last month as new orders tumbled, heightening fears that the global economy may be heading for another recession and driving stock markets lower.

Surveys of company purchasing managers showed manufacturing contracted in the euro zone for the first time in almost two years in August, echoing earlier data from South Korea and Taiwan where new export orders fell sharply.

The rest of the details in this Reuters story don't get any better. I borrowed this from yesterday's King Report...and the link is here.

Here's a very short piece by Carl Swenlin of decisionpoint.com fame, that was posted over at financialsense.com yesterday.

On August 17 the S&P 500 Index 50-EMA crossed down through the 200-EMA, declaring by our definition that the long-term trend was down and that we were in a bear market. When this happens, we remind ourselves that "bear market rules apply," and that we should expect negative outcomes more often than positive ones.

This is a small handful of very short paragraphs...and the chart is worth the trip all by itself. I thank reader U.D. for sliding it into my in-box very late last night...and the link is here.

The latest financial market convulsions have been tough for almost everyone, including traders caught on the wrong side of another big swing and pained everyday investors watching their dwindling holdings go down and up — and down again.

But there is a silver lining to even this latest market horror show, at least for the exchanges where the financial instruments change hands.

Businesses like the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange skim cents off each stock or contract bought or sold over their trading floors or computers. With the daily volumes of financial market contracts sent surging through their systems by nervous traders and investors up by billions, the latest trading rush is directly polishing their bottom line.

This 2-page story appeared in the August 27th edition of The New York Times...and I thank reader Phil Barlett for sending it along. The link is here.

Some 250,000 diplomatic dispatches from the US State Department have accidentally been made completely public. The files include the names of informants who now must fear for their lives. It is the result of a series of blunders by WikiLeaks and its supporters.

Everyone who knows a bit about computers can now have a look into the 250,000 US diplomatic dispatches that WikiLeaks made available to select news outlets late last year. All of them. What's more, they are the unedited, unredacted versions complete with the names of US diplomats' informants -- sensitive names from Iran, China, Afghanistan, the Arab world and elsewhere.

SPIEGEL reported on the secrecy slip-up last weekend, but declined to go into detail. Now, however, the story has blown up...and is one that comes as a result of a series of mistakes made by several different people. Together, they add up to a catastrophe. And the series of events reads like the script for a B movie.

You can't make this stuff up...and I thank reader Scott Pluschau for sending it along. The story is posted over at the German website spiegel.de...and the link is here.

The debt crisis has been a tough test of endurance for Europe. To better face such challenges in the future, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble wants to forge a new European Union treaty, the mass-circulation daily Bild reported Friday.

According to the report, Schäuble clarified his plan during a closed-door meeting of leaders of his conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) on Thursday evening. Shifting greater powers over economic and financial policy to Brussels is necessary, he said according to the paper, "even though we know how difficult a treaty change will be."

Schäuble also acknowledged that such reforms would create a significant divide between the 17 European Union countries that use the euro and the remaining 10 that do not.

This story, posted over at the speigel.de website yesterday, is another Roy Stephens offering...and the link is here.

An Italian radio program's story about Iceland’s on-going revolution is a stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world. We may remember that, at the start of the 2008 financial crisis, Iceland literally went bankrupt. The reasons were mentioned only in passing, and since then, this little-known member of the European Union fell back into oblivion.

As one European country after another fails or risks failing, imperiling the Euro, with repercussions for the entire world, the last thing the powers that be want is for Iceland to become an example.

Please put this on your absolute must read list for sometime this weekend. I thank reader Rob Bentley for sharing this story with us. It's posted over at the newsnetscotland.com website...and the link is here.

This is the partial headline from a piece posted over at zerohedge.com yesterday. It's based on a Reuters story yesterday that bore the headline "Gold Sales Would Not Solve Europe's Debt Troubles". Here are the first three paragraphs from the Reuters story...

Europe's most indebted nations are under heavy pressure from their richer neighbours to sort out their finances, but they are unlikely to mimic the impoverished gentlefolk of old by selling off the family silver -- or in their case, gold -- to do so.

More than 750 tonnes of gold are currently sitting in the state coffers of Portugal, Greece, and Spain alone, equal to about 17 percent of the 2010 annual supply of bullion from mining and sales of scrap.

Despite struggling with massive debt burdens and in some cases accepting multi-billion-euro bailout packages, the so-called PIIGS -- the countries above, plus Ireland and Italy -- have not dipped into their gold reserves to service that debt.

[Of course, at $1,900 the ounce, there is nowhere near the amount of gold necessary to repair every country's balance sheet. But, as I've said countless times over the years, all that has to be done is for the central banks of the world to re-price gold to say $20,000/ounce...and most European countries, along with the US, would be solvent overnight. Don't be surprised if it happens. - Ed]

The zerohedge.com piece has a bit of spin to it...and the link to that is here...and I thank reader Charley Orr for sending it. The link to the original Reuters piece, which I stole from a GATA release, is here.

With gold surging $50 and silver trading up over $1 on Friday, King World News interviewed one of the greats in the gold world, Keith Barron. Keith consults with major gold companies around the world as well as major brokerage houses and Keith is responsible for one of the largest gold discoveries in history.

Eric sent me the interview in the wee hours of this morning...and it's a must listen. The link is here.

Here's a story about gold that appeared at the irishtimes.com website yesterday. Like virtually all gold commentators these days, he doesn't understand the fact that the gold price is rising mainly because of massive short covering by the Commercial traders in the Comex futures market...but his heart is in the right place.

Investors, institutions and many central banks are diversifying into the commodity to protect themselves from the real risks posed by a global recession, by the intractable EU and US debt crises, from currency debasement and from financial and systemic contagion.

Gold remains the preserve of the smart, diversified money, and some of the largest institutional buyers of gold in the world today are pension funds and central banks.Prudent financial planners will continue to advocate global diversification and the importance of having an allocation to gold.

I thank Roy Stephens for sending me this story last night...and the link is here.

Alasdair Macleod, economist, former banker, and speaker at GATA's Gold Rush 2011 conference in London last month, was interviewed there by fellow speaker James Turk, founder of GoldMoney. They discussed government's erosion of savings through monetary debasement and central banking's creation of a boom-and-bust cycle through interest rate manipulation.

I borrowed the story...and Chris Powell's preamble...from a GATA release yesterday. The interview is 14 minutes long...and is posted over at the goldmoney.com website...and the link to this extraordinary interview is here.

Geopolitical analyst Jim Rickards, who spoke at GATA's Gold Rush 2011 conference last month, today gold King World News yesterday that inflation targeting -- explicit devaluation of the dollar -- is likely to be the focus of the next meeting of the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee and that investors are moving out of the exchange-traded gold fund GLD and taking delivery of real metal. The full audio interview has been posted at the KWN website...and the link is here.

Here's a short essay that was posted over at mises.org on September 1st. The most amazing part of this article is that fact that it originally appeared in the August 15th edition of Forbes...and what the author says below about the forces for monetary reform being very much in motion, is absolutely correct.

Monetary policy is the most recondite yet most pervasive and powerful of economic forces. Keynes, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, wrote...

"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

The converse also is true. Restoring real monetary integrity engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of prosperity. And forces for monetary reform are very much in motion.

I thank Australian reader Wesley Legrand for sending me this absolutely must read article...and the link is here.

Nick Laird, of sharelynx.com fame, sent me this 60-second youtube.com video yesterday...and, quite frankly, I wasn't at all prepared for what was in it...and unless you've already seen this, neither are you.

This is a must watch...and the link is here.