It’s more than Freddie and Fannie, the US banking system is in trouble, $500 billion and counting. Yet another crisis confronts us, as we will have to deal with the aftermath of a rather large number of bank failures over the next year, which is likely to overwhelm the ability of the FDIC to insure your bank deposits.

Delinquency rates on single-family mortgages have reached their highest level on record (the Fed started tracking this statistic in 1991), dragging up the delinquency rate on all loans held by U.S. banks.

Gold declined throughout the Far East and Europe in early Thursday morning trading. The decline rate accelerated about two hours before the Comex open in New York. Once the NY boys showed up, the price dropped another $8 to a low of $856.50 in just a few minutes.