ed steer of casey reserarch describes the machinations of the bullion markets as we are provided with (yet another) buying opportunity:

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

I was looking for a way to describe what's going on out there without using a half dozen paragraphs to get the job done. It was then that I discovered the following commentary (over at Bill Murphy's lemetropolecafe.com) by fellow Canadian, Peter Degraaf. He doesn't mind admitting that TA is pretty useless in the face of this kind of intervention...from his Friday evening e-mail:

"Featured is the daily gold chart. Gold closed just above the $850 support line during a washout caused by the performance of a US dollar that defies belief. Without any improvement in fundamentals, the dollar rose 132 points today. The largest gain in years! Despite a banking crisis, low interest rates, huge deficits, money supply running in double digits, housing sector in shambles, the US dollar has now risen 8 out of the last 9 days. Someone please convince me that this is not rigged. Meanwhile at $855.00 the gold price is back at $323.00 expressed in 1980 dollars!"

I wonder what Peter had to say about yesterday's performance...now that gold is on sale for under $300 as expressed in 1980 dollars! Silver too! It's time to take out another mortgage on the house and buy as much physical as you can, as these fire sale prices won't be around forever. The boyz really did it yesterday...they broke both metals below all technical resistance...which was probably their plan. Does this mean that gold is down for the count? Don't know. Charts don't mean much in a managed market. Is this the bottom? Don't know that either.

Ted Butler and I have been guessing this bottom (wrongly) every day since the prices broke through the 200 day moving averages. How soon will it recover? Another good question for which neither Ted nor myself have any answer. But as I mentioned in previous commentaries...options expiry for August is the 26th...and September is a huge delivery month for silver. Can the crooks keep prices this low until then? Beats me.