these two reports come from gata, examples of manipulation in the metals markets.

Who knows where spot gold will be when trading finishes this evening in NY?. Sometimes I watch the spot market closely, refreshing up to 20 times a minute. The $15.00 plunge in spot gold this morning in London was one of the steepest swan dives ever, occurring in about a minute-as the Kitco chart evidences. Lo and behold-silver had the exact same pattern. Of course the market commentators will try and rationalize this price action-natural profit taking- a rising USD-a falling oil price etc, etc. That is because they have nowhere else to go. The KITCO charts, however, may not depict the subsequent price action. I have spent several further sessions refreshing the spot gold chart-up to 20 refreshes per minute. Subsequent to this swan dive, the spot price of gold could move by $1.50 either way per refresh ie. up to 20 times per minute. Clearly the seller(s) causing the initial swan dive were hell bent on keeping the spot price suppressed. How much gold does this type of price action consume? It would be very interesting to know the precise answer to that question. Is such blatant manipulation the consequence of extreme desperation?

and another opinion:

The bad guys are not even trying to disguise their intervention in the gold market any more. I know you always refer to the gold cartel but at the current time I think the reality is that our principal opponents are the Western central banks led by the Fed and the US Treasury. Their ability to use derivatives without any regulatory interference gives them a big advantage and I think we have to recognise that whilst certain elements of the gold world understand the unsustainability of the current financial arrangements, the rest of the Western investment community simply doesn't want to go there. I am increasingly of the view that the central banks' grip on the gold price will only be broken when a sovereign buyer decides to enter the market in scale. The likely catalyst for this will be a further sharp fall in the value of the dollar and the most vulnerable points here must be the Middle Eastern and Asian dollar pegs. We are not there yet but at this stage it is baked in the cake.

i still think we are in for a hockey stick market this year; ten months of sideways movement as the government tries to keep the markets from exploding, and then two months of a parabolic move after the election when the market does explode. this could mean your money is dead for the next six months, but you never know. the summer is usually a slow seasonal period for gold and silver, but one of these years gold and silver will stop trading as commodities, and start trading as money. when it arrives, monetary or investment demand for the metals will swamp supply, and anecdotal evidence is already pointing to tightness or spot shortages in the silver market.