By Alison Vekshin and Ari Levy, Bloomberg

Integrity Bank of Alpharetta, Georgia, was closed by U.S. regulators today, the 10th bank to collapse this year amid a surge in soured real-estate loans stemming from the worst housing slump since the Great Depression.

Integrity Bank, with $1.1 billion in assets and $974 million in deposits, was shuttered by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Regions Financial Corp., Alabama’s biggest bank, will assume all deposits from Integrity, which was run by Integrity Bancshares Inc. The failed bank’s five offices will open on Sept. 2 as branches of Regions, the FDIC said.

“Depositors will continue to be insured with Regions Bank so there is no need for customers to change their banking relationship to retain their deposit insurance,” the FDIC said.

Banks are being closed at the fastest pace in 14 years as financial companies report more than $505 billion in writedowns and credit losses since 2007. California lender IndyMac Bancorp Inc., which had $32 billion in assets, was closed July 11 in the third-largest bank seizure, contributing to a 14 percent drop in the U.S. deposit insurance fund that had $45.2 billion at the end of the in the second quarter.  Read more….

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PRNewswire-FirstCall

All other CME, CBOT and NYMEX products retain previously announced hours

In response to concerns about Hurricane Gustav, CME Group, the world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange, today announced that it has revised its Labor Day holiday trading schedule (all times are Eastern time) for NYMEX energy products. On Sunday, August 31, all NYMEX energy products trading on the CME Globex® electronic trading platform will open for trading at 2:30 p.m. (Eastern), with a 2:00 p.m. (Eastern) pre-opening, for a September 2, 2008, trade date. NYMEX ClearPort® Clearing and NYMEX ClearPort® Trading will also now re-open for trading on this schedule on Sunday, August 31.

“We wanted to provide our customers with the opportunity to respond to the storm’s potential impact to energy markets as quickly as possible,” said CME Group Chief Operating Officer Bryan Durkin. “The ability to trade both our exchange-listed and over-the-counter energy products during this period will be a significant benefit for global energy market participants.” Read more….

By Jim Polson, Bloomberg

The New York Mercantile Exchange announced an extended trading session beginning at 2:30 p.m. today because of Gustav.

Hurricane Gustav threatens to hurt U.S. oil and natural-gas production and refining more severely than hurricanes Katrina and Rita did three years ago.

Gustav, downgraded to a Category 3 storm by the National Hurricane Center in Miami this morning, may strengthen to Category 4 later today and will make landfall as a “major” hurricane. The storm shut three-quarters of oil output in the region and refineries operated by Valero Energy Corp., the largest U.S. refiner, ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. There will be a special trading session today at the New York Mercantile Exchange.

“This storm will prove to be a worst-case scenario for the production region,” Jim Rouiller, senior energy meteorologist for Planalytics.com, said yesterday in an e-mailed message. “This storm will be more dangerous than Katrina.”

The center issued a hurricane watch from High Island, Texas, to Florida at 2 a.m. today. Gustav’s winds were estimated at 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour as it made landfall in western Cuba. While they slowed to 125 miles per hour this morning, the storm is forecast to gain strength as it passes into the central gulf today. Gustav was 425 miles southeast of the Mississippi River’s mouth and traveling northwest at about 15 mph at 4 a.m.

BP Plc, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil company, led producers shutting wells and whisking staff ashore. About 77 percent of Gulf oil output and 37 percent of natural-gas production was shut, the U.S. Minerals Management Service said in a statement yesterday. The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the nation’s largest crude-oil terminal, closed yesterday. Read more….

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Recent heat from Congress and regulators, along with public speculation, over whether commodity prices are being manipulated has also reached gold pits, where the debate was stirred by a surge in bets last month that gold prices would fall.

“Congress is already investigating allegations of manipulation in the oil market, and it seems likely that it is only a matter of time before a similar investigation will be required in the precious metal markets,” said Mark O’Byrne, executive director at Gold and Silver Investment.

Three unidentified U.S. banks held 86,398 short positions, or bets that gold prices will fall, in the COMEX gold market as of Aug. 5 — 10 times more short positions than a month earlier, a government report showed. Read more…

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NEW YORK (AFP) – Wracked by drought, Iran has turned to the United States for wheat for the first time in 27 years, marking a setback for Tehran’s search for agricultural self-sufficiency.

According to a recent US Department of Agriculture report, Iran has bought about 1.18 million tonnes of US hard wheat since the beginning of the 2008-2009 crop season in June. Read more…

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By CNBC

Check your portfolio: You may be invested in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and not even know it.

While much attention is paid to the daily gyrations of Fannie (NYSE:FNM – News) and Freddie (NYSE:FRE – News) common stock, investors might not realize that the two government-sponsored mortgage giants are common components of mutual funds and company pension plans. Read more…

What a busy week for ETF providers! Invesco PowerShares Capital Management said Wednesday that it’s releasing four new global, commodity-based ETFs that include the largest and most liquid companies in their sectors. Read more…

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By Morgan Housel

Think of the dollar’s value as the nation’s stock price. If a company spends more than it makes, its net worth falls. Running never-ending deficits in your personal finances leads to eventual ruin, of course, but somehow people believe that if those deficits are formed within a country, they’re spared from logic. But they’re not. Read more…

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By Jim Willie CB

The highest functions of the financial system have finally broken to the point where smart and connected people are openly making comments. Shortages are acute, to the point where low prices for gold & silver, for instance, render supply as inadequate to meet huge growing demand that wants to exploit the artificially low prices. Even the USTreasury Bonds are enjoying artificially high prices, undoubtedly an extension of the colossal usage of US Federal Reserve lending swap facilities. They print new USTBonds and exchange new third world (US) government debt securities for acidic US mortgage bonds, some hastily cobbled into securities by ailing lending institutions from cratered mortgage loans portfolios. Read more...

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By Chuck Butler

OK… When the dollar made huge strides at the end of July and beginning of August, my colleague, and long time friend, Chris Gaffney, Pfilled in for me with the Pfennig, and wrote that he believed the dollar’s reversal to be Central Bank Intervention… We received a few emails from people asking us to follow up on that thought, but we couldn’t… Until now!

The Bloomie is reporting this morning that “finance officials form the U.S., Japan and Europe, in mid-march drew up plans to strengthen the dollar following troubles at Bear Stearns.” The story which originally appeared in Nikkei English News went on to report that: “the intervention designed by the U.S. Treasury Dept. Japan’s Finance Ministry and the European Central Bank, called for the central banks to purchase dollars and sell euros and yen, with Japan providing the yen needed for the currency swap if the greenback’s value dropped significantly.

The three groups, which considered making an emergency statement through G-7, did not stipulate a specific exchange rate for the potential intervention, nor did they detail the amount of money to be used. Read more…

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