Market manipulation

Moral and ethical values are gone and crime is rampant. This is not new in history and regularly happens at the end of major eras or cycles. This happened for example at the end of the Roman Empire as Rome disintegrated economically and morally. Decadence was rampant then as it is today. So were...

Egon von Greyerz and Matthew Piepenburg address gold’s recent “flash crash” in the context of technicals, fundamentals, and good ol’ fashioned price manipulation from the bullion banks. Toward this end, Egon gives careful attention to the technical indicators and their bullish trends/confirmation...

Acting straight away on the rates would have an even more devastating effect on the system as a whole. This is the impasse that the central banks have now got themselves into, in their interventionist policies. Acting straight away will break the engine. That’s what the math is telling us. Gold a...

What happened this morning very strongly looks like a “cleaning” of stop losses and “weak hands”. Another positive argument that militates for gold (and incidentally silver) is that real rates are diving.

The beginning of the end of the current monetary system started exactly 50 years ago. In the next few years the world will experience the end of the end of another failed experiment of unlimited debt creation and fake fiat money. Measured in collapsing paper money, gold and silver will reach unth...

Chat logs introduced as evidence by prosecutors at the Chicago spoofing trial of two former precious-metals traders for Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch unit show one of them, Edward Bases, bragging about how easy it was to manipulate prices.

In the short term, the paper gold market certainly harms the only genuine gold market which is physical. But artificial markets or instruments have never survived in history. Just look at the fact that every fiat currency in history which has failed. And so will paper gold. It is only a matter of...

Like many fixed-income securities, the gold prices are completely detached from supply and demand. The mechanism for determining prices is distorted by ‘tools’ that enable the monetary authorities to alter the perception of their inflationary monetary policies.

The economic actors’ confidence regarding the central banks’ ability to correct this inflation, which they deem to be transitory, is certainly not open to question today. However, without rapid and specific action by these central banks (particularly on interest rates), this patience, which is al...

What was it that caused the sheer scale of this fall? Did the Fed raise interest rates brusquely and sharply, leading to a reaction like this on gold? The conclusions of the Fed’s meeting last week are far from dramatic, though. Nonetheless, they had the effect of an electric shock.