While I have not promoted the "manipulation" conspiracy, I've always held it as a possibility with the attitude of "hey, if they are manipulating the prices lower, better for me to buy".

But more and more evidence is overwhelmingly pointing to a manipulated PM market. What was complete conspiracy a few years ago, is fact today. What would you have said 7 years ago if someone said big banks were manipulating LIBOR? (actually a Farm Credit I'm acquainted with quit using it as a bench mark because it was acting "funny".) Now it is a fact it has been manipulated and for a long time. What about the FX markets 7 years ago? Anyone said it was a rigged market would have been laughed at.

So that is just a couple of the things we DO know. How much of it we D'ONT know yet? I bet we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Thousands of paper contracts sold at illiquid times of the market to make the price go down. Oh, maybe it was just some idiot with lots of money loosing on poor execution because he did not know how to place sell orders for the best price execution. Time and time and time and time and time again for years. The whole thing stinks like a dead fish laying on the bank for a few days.

There are lots of good reasons the Fed would not want the price of gold to rise. But of course they tell us they don't care about gold. Er.. ahh... except for Greenspan now that he is no longer in an official capacity. The Fed would never lie to us would they? I think it is their job to lie to us. What would you call management of "inflation expectations" if it were not lies to get us to believe what they want us to believe.

Manipulations can not last forever. But with enough money and power backing them they can go on for a long, long time. Look at Bernie Madoff's scheme. According to Jim Rickards it is not so much that the Fed wants to keep the price low, but it is that they do not want to let it get our of hand and rise too quickly. And in fact they may even use it some day to devalue the dollar against. Rickards has been right about a lot. He predicted several years ago that all the countries could not devalue at once (unless they do it against gold). They would do it one after another. QE US quits and Japan starts. EU talking about it next. He said they would have to take turns devaluing one against another. That is exactly what we have done, and continue to do. In a while it will get back to the USA's turn. For now we can pretend we are quitting QE. But QE somewhere has to happen, or defaults start happening. The spinning plates of debt start slowing down and falling off the poles and deflation and debt defaults hit crisis levels.

So the Fed has good reason to keep a lid on gold. But my suspicions right now is they are not worried about it and with a "wink, wink" they let the big banks take care of it. My suspicion is gold will be "contained" until either 1. it can no longer be or more likely 2. all the entities that want to own it have all they want. My suspicion is that if or when gold makes any meteoric rise, the bullion banks that specialize in it will curiously have huge inventories of the metal if at all possible. If they get caught and #1. happens, then we get bail-outs or bail-ins. But I really believe now (and that firm belief has only came about in the last year or so, suspicions earlier but belief now) that the manipulation will be allowed to happen till the correct people/firms are in a position to benefit the most, when things in this country appear to be direst, we will have a "never let a good crisis go to waste" moment and gold will be turned loose.

I say this not as a gold owner speculating to sell it at a high price to make a "profit". I say this as a gold owner hoping I'm wrong and preparing in case it does happen. Because it will not be times to rejoice for gold owners or anyone else. It will be a bad day for all. Just some worse than others.

John