this commentary is from ed steer of casey research:

The assault on silver was even more vicious. As I mentioned in the prior paragraph, silver rallied smartly right from the Sydney open yesterday morning...and the price peaked at the same time as gold...precisely 9:00 a.m. in London. From there, the selling pressure was enormous...and at precisely 9:30 a.m. in New York, JPMorgan et al pulled their bids. The silver price dropped like a stone to its low of the day...over 45 cents in less than half an hour. From there, a 20 cent rally occurred...but, like gold, at a few minutes before 1:00 p.m...selling pressure resumed almost into the close of electronic trading at 5:15 p.m.

click to enlarge

Once again it should be obvious to all that if the bullion banks hadn't intervened, gold would have blasted through the $1,000 barrier like it didn't exist...which is exactly the reason that they were on top of the situation almost from get-go in Sydney...and never let up from there.

I was hoping after Friday that maybe there would be some respite from the selling...as the HUI had finished up two days in a row...despite a declining gold price. Alas, it was not to be...so now I have to revisit the 50-day moving averages in both metals. As of yesterday's close, silver's 50-day m.a. was at $12.09...and gold's was 893.82. So, from where both metals sit as of this writing, silver would have to drop to the $11.90 range for a couple of days...and gold around $880. IF they can get those prices that low for a couple of days...and keep them there...then virtually all the tech funds in both gold and silver would be liquidated. Ted Butler says that the vast majority of silver tech funds have already exited the market and it may not be necessary to go that low in price. We'll see. And lastly from Ted Butler is the following mind-boggling statistic...as of Commitment of Traders report on Friday...'4 or less' U.S. bullion banks [in the Commercial category] are short more than 72% of the entire Comex silver market...a new record high. If this is not manipulation, it would be nice if the CFTC explained to us what percentage concentration would constitute manipulation. Just asking. Too bad your silver mining companies aren't.

http://caseyresearch.com/displayDrp....