if history means anything, it seems likely that precious metals will be held down until the fed meeting on april 30. this week james turk said once again that gold could spike to $1500 this summer on a developing currency crisis.

despite the manipulation in the gold and silver markets, we saw more evidence of how underpriced junior mining shares are when new gold, metallica, and peak gold agreed to a 3-way merger. pierre lassonde got fed up with the market valuations, and created a mid-tier producer with a market cap of $1.6 billion.

i think we will see more of this ahead, as companies like agnico-eagle with high valuations can use their stock as currency to acquire undervalued juniors.

but you would never suspect that from looking at the market performance on friday. citigroup reports a loss of "only" $5 billion, and in wall street's bizarro world, that is considered good news, so the broad market surges, and gold goes down $23, and silver down 40 cents.

if we needed any more proof of manipulation, oil hit $116/bbl on the same day. a guest at financialsense.com this weekend said $30 of the oil price is now due to investment. in other words, oil is now seen as an inflation hedge against the declining dollar. since bernanke began slashing the fed funds rate, the dollar has lost support, and the oil price soared. since higher oil prices lead to higher everything else prices, these interest rate cuts have directly fuelled more inflation. unfortunately, the oil market is not as easily manipulated as the gold and silver exchanges, so oil might trade at $85/bbl if we had a sound dollar.

btw, if anyone is interested, there are a few varieties of etf available for you to purchase your favorite hydrocarbon. uso, ung, and uga for crude oil, natural gas, and gasoline. so now you can invest in oil or gas, or buy enough gasoline to lock in today's price for the rest of your life without the risk of buying futures. but imo, if oil and gas are good investments, silver and gold at these levels are even better.