For now, gold and silver are winning against banker price suppression schemes. I say “for now” because I have followed gold and silver markets for well over a decade now and I have seen too many rigged smashes of gold and silver prices, especially when gold and silver stackers seem to get their hopes up too high, to ever believe that bankers will ever stop trying to smash gold and silver prices. In fact, during this current rise, behind the scenes data I’ve analyzed definitively has delineated that bankers have been attempting to draw the line in the sand at $1,400 an ounce with gold and at $16 an ounce with silver. Now that gold is more than $100 above that point and silver more than 6.8% above the prices at which global bankers tried to stymie the silver price, have Central/ Global bankers abandoned their efforts to artificially engineer further gold and silver price smashes? I would say definitively not. In fact, until I see gold clear the $1,700 hurdle and silver clear the $20 hurdle, I would not be willing to concede that bankers have lost their battle as of yet.
We should not forget past history, when bankers unethically and immorally raised margins on silver futures contracts five times in nine days to smash silver prices artificially and cause waterfall panic declines in silver prices in 2011 once silver reached $50 an ounce. Bankers still have these tools in their asset price manipulation toolkit and we should be wary that since gold and silver prices still are largely set in heavily manipulated paper gold and silver futures markets, that this possibility still looms ahead. In fact, even though Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, United Bank of Switzerland, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch all have been found guilty of deliberately and artificially suppressing gold prices in the past, not a single banker from any of these firms is in jail for doing so. Consequently, we know that bankers have complete immunity from prosecution for committing any crimes they desire in the global gold and silver futures markets. For example, in one of the linked articles above, John Edmonds, a 13-year JP Morgan banker, when convicted of his criminal behavior in manipulating gold prices, stated that “he learned how to manipulate prices from more senior traders and that his supervisors at the firm knew of his actions” and deliberately manipulated gold, silver, platinum and palladium prices for seven years, all with the approval of his supervisors. Even though gold price suppression was a systemic criminal activity at JP Morgan by Mr. Edmond’s own admission, no JP Morgan banker ever went to jail. In fact, the original article, written in November of 2018 mentioned that John Edmonds could be sentenced to 30 years in jail for his repugnant criminal behavior, a statement that elicited much laughter upon reading. If a Western banker ever though that he could receive 30-years in jail as punishment for illegally manipulating gold and silver prices, he simply would never do it.
Unless a bank-employed trader is found guilty of manipulating gold prices in China, for which he or she could be sentenced to death for this action, it would genuinely shock me if a Western judge ever sentenced a Western banker to considerable jail time for deliberately suppressing gold and silver prices. When Mr. Edmonds was to be sentenced for his crimes in December 2018, I checked the news and discovered that his sentencing has been postponed for 5 months until May of 2019. When May 2019 arrived, I again checked to discover if he had indeed been sentenced to 30 years in jail, and once again, was unsurprised to discover that his sentencing had been postponed until November 2019. Who knows, by that time a JP Morgan endorsed President may have been elected, and Mr. Edmonds may be granted a full pardon by then. On the opposite side of this coin, Mr. Edmonds’s sentencing has been indefinitely delayed because he is being squeezed by investigators and he has been squealing; consequently, the possibility also must be considered, if Mr. Edmonds has been implicating powerful, wealthy bankers in his testimony, that he may meet the same fate as child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
In any event, the criminal corporate culture established at firms like JP Morgan by their top executives plays a massive role in why people like Mr. Edmonds found it acceptable to engage in criminal behavior for 7 years that any person of any morals would immediately deem as unacceptable. We only need reference the controversial but very illuminating 1971 Stanford Experiment, a psychological behavioral study in which volunteers were split into two groups of prisoners and prison guards. The social experiment quickly spiraled out of control when the group of people play acting the role of prison guards became drunk with power and started psychologically and physically abusing the group of people play acting the role of the prisoners. In other words, once repugnant behavior became normalized among the group playing the role of the prison guards, they all started to act repugnantly towards the prisoners. The volunteers were randomly split up into the two groups of prisoners and prison guards by a coin flip, so there was no bias towards placing the volunteers with more aggressive, sociopathic tendencies into the prison guard role and placing volunteers with more passive, compliant profiles into the prisoner group. Yet, within a couple of days, the group that played the role of the prison guards banded together and started behaving unethically and repugnantly toward the prisoners to such a great degree, that by day 3, the administrators of the experiment were forced to release one of the “prisoners” that exhibited “acute emotional disturbance, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage” due to dehumanizing treatment at the hands of the guards. If we realize that a subject in this experiment could only last 3 days under the watchful eyes of “guards” who were giving free reign to decide how to make the “prisoners” comply and behave, then it is easy to understand how an employee that works in an environment in which criminal activity is normalized for not 3 days, but for months, then years, and finally decades could eventually convince himself that he was “doing nothing wrong” even when any outsider would disagree. In fact, such an argument is often given by bankers that testify on behalf of colleagues prosecuted for criminal activity, in which they argue that their colleague should not go to jail because every banker engages in the exact same activity. In other words, they view criminal behavior as “normal” and not as wrong after repeated exposure to it over time.
In any event, as I write this article on 8 August, US time, 8 hours before the markets will open in New York, gold trades at $1,506 an ounce and silver at $17.10. In the short term, I would not be surprised to see gold pull back to $1,480 an ounce and silver below $16.80 as bankers have a vested interest in pushing silver back below the $16.80 range. There are a lot of politics at play in the gold/silver price war between East and West, as the crux of the US- China trade war runs much deeper than that which meets the eye, and the ongoing currency war between these nations is the force that is truly driving the trade war. Consequently, politics will play a key role in whether gold and silver prices will keep creeping higher or whether the global bankers will go all in in using the tools at their disposal to try to push back gold and silver prices again. In other words, behind-the-scenes politics may actually handcuff just how low bankers can push gold and silver prices during their next attempt to take down prices.
About the author: J.Kim is the Founder and Chief Education Officer of skwealthacademy, a coming revolutionary, disruptive online education academy that focuses on the provision of all essential missing educational components of schooling today such as critical thinking, applied knowledge, business ethics, and the pursuit of meaning through the attainment of life purpose and holistic wealth. Sign up for my weekly newsletter here and subscribe to my new maalamalama YouTube channel here.
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