Infowars.com | The road couldn’t be bumpier. As the G20 meet today in Cannes, you can bet that the embattled Greek PM George Papandreou will be getting ‘the hair-dryer treatment’ from Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Sarkozy. Back in Athens, Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek finance minister and the PM’s likely successor – was hospitalised on Tuesday suffering from the mother of all stomach ulcers.

Bloomberg | The most accurate forecasters say gold will rebound from its biggest monthly plunge since 2008 and reach a record by March because economic growth is stagnating and Europe’s debt crisis is unresolved. Futures traded in New York may rise 12 percent to $1,950 an ounce by the end of the first quarter, according to the median of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The predictions are from eight of the top 10 analysts tracked by Bloomberg over the past eight quarters. Two declined to give forecasts.

Stand Up America | The fact that the Federal Reserve is neither “Federal” nor a “Reserve,” and also not part of the official Federal Government is now clear to most of the world, and certainly to the concerned citizenry of the USA, finally. What is not known, but bandied about on the internet for quite some time is: Where did the money go?

Rolling Stones | I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news. "I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO," he said. "I think that's funny." "Okay, I'll bite," I said. "Why is that funny?" "Well, I heard they're trying to decide what bank to put their money in," he said, munching on hors d'oeuvres. "It's just kind of ironic."

Democracy Now | As protests continue against Wall Street and the nation’s biggest banks, we speak to British journalist Ed Vulliamy, author of "Amexica: War Along the Borderline." Vulliamy exposes how one bank, Wachovia, made millions in the Mexican drug war. At the time, Wachovia was the nation’s fourth-largest bank. It has since been taken over by Wells Fargo. "You can’t drive around Mexico with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash in a semi-artic truck. It has to be banked," Vulliamy said. "What I found was that it is coming into the United States, into the banking system.

TheNewAmerican.com | David Galland’s article for the Daily Reckoning painted a picture of imminent collapse of America’s monetary system, which was followed four days later by Clive Maund’s possible scenario of bank failures following on the heels of a eurozone collapse. Mamta Badkar raised the specter of hyperinflation in his Business Insider article by reviewing the “10 Worst Hyper-Inflation Horror-Stories of the Past Century,” reflecting interest in whether, or how, the economic disaster of hyperinflation would affect the United States.

TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com | The U.S. economy is dying and most American voters have no idea why it is happening.  Unfortunately, the mainstream media and most of our politicians are not telling the truth about the collapse of the economy.  This generation was handed the keys to the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen, and we have completely wrecked it.  Decades of incredibly foolish decisions have left us drowning in an ocean of corruption, greed and bad debt.  Thousands of businesses and millions of jobs have left the country and poverty is exploding from coast to coast.

SeekingAlpha.com | There aren't a lot of interviews that I'm willing to sit through and hang on every word. But when Eric Sprott or his partner John Embry of Sprott Physical Gold (PHYS) and Sprott Physical Silver (PSLV) give an interview, I'm all ears. Recently, at the Casey Research/Sprott Summit, When Money Dies, Louis James spoke with Sprott Inc. founder Eric Sprott on the risk involved in holding money in banks, and the likely future of precious metals stocks.

Independent | Up close, the most striking feature of the reforms being forced on Greece by its international creditors is their destructiveness and futility. The pay cuts, tax rises, cuts and job losses agreed to by parliament in Athens last week will serve only to send the economy into a steeper tailspin, even if it extracted a much-needed €8bn in bailout money from the EU leaders. "Nothing but a lost war could be worse than this situation," one left-wing ex-minister tells me. "What is worse, no party or political group in Greece is offering real solutions to our crisis."

TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com | Most people have no idea that Wall Street has become a gigantic financial casino.  The big Wall Street banks are making tens of billions of dollars a year in the derivatives market, and nobody in the financial community wants the party to end.  The word "derivatives" sounds complicated and technical, but understanding them is really not that hard.  A derivative is essentially a fancy way of saying that a bet has been made.  Originally, these bets were designed to hedge risk, but today the derivatives market has mushroomed into a mountain of speculation unlike anything the world has ever seen before.

Telegraph | Sitting in the poolside restaurant at the Trump International hotel in Las Vegas, my eye was taken by a saying by the inimitable 'Donald’ etched into a floor-to-ceiling mirror: 'As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.’  Opened in 2008, the Trump International stands back from Las Vegas Boulevard, the main thoroughfare known as the Strip. With its 1,250 rooms and 50 penthouse suites on 64 storeys, the Trump is far from being the largest of the steroid-pumped hotel resorts along the Strip – it does not even boast a casino – and yet, standing in its perfect isolation, its windows clad in 24ct gold, it resembles nothing so much as a huge shimmering tombstone, a metaphor for the near-death experience that Las Vegas, where 'thinking big’ is what they do, has gone through in recent years.

Reuters | Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is advocating for regulatory control over the money-market mutual fund industry and believes the government should stop financing mortgages. Volcker said in a recent speech that money market funds have exacerbated stress in the financial markets because they pulled back on short-term lending to European banks.

Business Insider | In an analyst note, Bofa/ML Ethan S. Harris drops a bit of a bombshell prediction: We expect a moderate slowdown in the beginning of next year, as two small policy shocks—another debt downgrade and fiscal tightening—hit the economy. The “not-so-super” Deficit Commission is very unlikely to come up with a credible deficit-reduction plan. The committee is more divided than the overall Congress. Since the fall-back plan is sharp cuts in discretionary spending, the whole point of the Committee is to put taxes and entitlements on the table. However, all the Republican members have signed the Norquist “no taxes” pledge and with taxes off the table it is hard to imagine the liberal Democrats on the Committee agreeing to significant entitlement cuts. The credit rating agencies have strongly suggested that further rating cuts are likely if Congress does not come up with a credible long-run plan. Hence, we expect at least one credit downgrade in late November or early December when the super Committee crashes.

FinancialSense.com | Oftentimes perception, and not reality, rules the day with the thousands or millions of speculators placing short term bets with assets like silver. These perceptions are particularly strong given that paper players in the silver market often control the price in the short term (6-8 months), since there is so much more paper silver than physical metal out there.

Reuters | The United States will likely suffer the loss of its triple-A credit rating from another major rating agency by the end of this year due to concerns over the deficit, Bank of America Merrill Lynch forecasts. The trigger would be a likely failure by Congress to agree on a credible long-term plan to cut the U.S. deficit, the bank said in a research note published on Friday.