Every day it seems that the manipulation of the monetary metals markets can't get any more obvious, and every day it does. But at least the manipulation is starting to aggravate certain mining stock touts who have paid little heed to it.
This week one of those touts, Adam Hamilton of Zeal LLC, wholeheartedly acknowledged what he called "gold futures shorting attacks."
"The only reason to sell 20,000-plus gold futures contracts within minutes is to brazenly attempt to manipulate gold's price lower," Hamilton wrote in commentary posted at GoldSeek, 24hGold, and 321Gold, among other internet sites:
http://news.goldseek.com/Zealllc/1493999579.php
http://www.24hgold.com/english/news-gold-silv...-shorting-at...
http://www.321gold.com/editorials/hamilton...lton050517.html
Hamilton added: "Long-side speculators who want to exit positions never sell so fast, since it blasts gold lower, wrecking their exit prices. And the same is true for normal short-side speculators. If they expect gold to drop and want to establish shorts, they execute their selling gradually for the best entries.
"Long-side and short-side speculators alike want to sell gold futures at the highest gold price possible. So they don't sabotage their own exits and entries by unleashing far more selling than the market can bear. Normal rational speculators enter and exit large positions relative to market volume gradually, over hours. A 20,000-plus contract buy or sell order broken into pieces and spread across hours will have a far-smaller price impact."
Indeed. But who undertakes these strange attacks? Hamilton can attribute them only to "speculators" who hope to profit by provoking panic selling by ordinary gold investors, through which the "speculators" can cover their shorts. Hamilton adds that these attacks are "always short-lived."
Yet these attacks often require access to billions of dollars, money available only to the world's biggest financial institutions, particularly central banks. And while these attacks may be "short-lived" in their individual manifestations, of course they have been happening for years, ever since the gold futures market opened in the United States in 1974, just after the U.S. government sought and received assurances from bullion banks in London that a gold futures market would facilitate the injection of so much volatility that ordinary investors would be scared out of gold:
target="_blank"
http://www.gata.org/node/17081
Hamilton doesn't seem to have noticed that there are never "gold futures buying attacks," which, like Sherlock Holmes' observation about "the dog that didn't bark," is a powerful clue about what is really happening in gold. If "speculators" can make money by triggering panic selling in gold, couldn't they, if they wanted to, also make money triggering panic buying every once in a while? So why don't they want to?
The answer, of course, is that the attacks are not being undertaken by mere "speculators" at all but by central banks, as GATA long has documented:
target="_blank"
http://www.gata.org/node/14839
But if central banks are ever acknowledged as the manipulators of the monetary metals market, defending their currencies and bonds against a potentially independent world reserve currency, gold and silver mining stocks would have the world's most powerful enemies and touting them to unwary investors would become much more difficult.
So Hamilton cheerfully assures his readers that "gold stocks are wildly oversold today, poised for a major surge," and urges them to subscribe to his newsletter, where he will help them invest in a sector that is priced at less than half of what it was five years ago and 80 percent less than what it was 10 years ago:
target="_blank"
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EXAU?ltr=1
Yes, gold and gold stocks are "wildly oversold," but no amount of touting is going to get them up until the sector and the people who write about it have the wit, integrity, and courage to identify just who is keeping them down and why.
