There's no doubt in my mind that gold and silver are manipulated. The real harm though, comes not from that fact so much as the way it diverts attention from the far more serious problem: the endless pyramiding of debt to shore up an already failed banking system.
We need to stop calling these institutions "too big to fail." They have already failed. That was 2008. Now they're too big to bail - that is to say, every increment of debt aimed in their direction has increasingly less effect. Eventually the whole game will collapse, as all Ponzi schemes do, at which point the real question is not how much your gold is worth, but how do you restart the economy, and what sort of financial system should underpin it.
ebear