Silver nugget. Photo: Jurii (CC)

“The conspiracy and scheme was enormously successful, netting the defendants substantial illegal profits” in the billions of dollars  … JPMorgan and HSBC together “controlled over 85 percent the commercial net short positions” … William D. Cohan writes in the New York Times:

As Americans know all too well by this point, commodity prices — for corn, wheat, soybeans, crude oil, gold and even farmland — have been going through the roof for what seems like forever. There are many causes, primarily supply and demand pressures driven by fears about the unrest in the Middle East, the rise of consumerism in China and India, and the Fed’s $600 billion campaign to increase the money supply.

Nonetheless, how to explain the price of silver? In the past six months, the value of the precious metal has increased nearly 80 percent, to more than $34 an ounce from around $19 an ounce. In the last month alone, its price has increased nearly 23 percent. This kind of price action in the silver market is reminiscent of the fortune-busting, roller-coaster ride enjoyed by the Hunt Brothers, Nelson Bunker and William Herbert, back in 1970s and early 1980s when they tried unsuccessfully to corner the market. When the Hunts started buying silver in 1973, the price of the metal was $1.95 an ounce. By early 1980, the brothers had driven the price up to $54 an ounce before the Federal Reserve intervened, changed the rules on speculative silver investments and the price plunged. The brothers later declared bankruptcy.

The Hunts may be gone from the market, but there are still plenty of people suspicious about the trading in silver, and now they have the Web to explore and to expand their conspiracy narratives. This time around — according to bloggers and commenters on sites with names like Silverseek, 321Gold and Seeking Alpha — silver shot up in price after a whistleblower exposed an alleged conspiracy to keep the price artificially low despite the inflationary pressure of the Fed’s cheap money policy. (Some even suspect that the Fed itself was behind the effort to keep silver prices low, as a way to keep the dollar’s value artificially high.) Trying to unravel the mysterious rise in silver’s price is a conspiracy theorist’s dream, replete with powerful bankers, informants, suspicious car accidents and a now a squeeze on short sellers. Most intriguingly, however, much of the speculation seems highly plausible.

For more information, see original article.

The Utah House of Representatives has approved a bill that allowing gold and silver coins to be used as currency, though unlike similar bills in other states, it doesn’t force anyone to accept gold or silver as legal tender.

House Bill 317 was introduced by state Rep. Brad Galvez (R) last week, and passed the House by a vote of 47-26. It will now head to the state Senate for a vote.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Galvez explained: “This is a step in preparedness, a step in security that allows us to be able to help hold up our economy as the dollar continues to shrink.”

As TPM has been documenting, there’s been a recent push for gold and silver coins to be used as currency. Georgia state Rep. Bobby Franklin (R) recently reintroduced legislation to force his state to conduct all monetary transactions with U.S. gold or silver coins — including the payment of taxes.

[Continues at Talking Points]

U.S. 1933 Double Eagle Gold Coin

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the United States federal currency has been grossly devalued as the Federal Reserve has been printing paper dollars 24/7 to fund the “stimulus” that’s supposed to end the bleak recession we’ve been stuck in for the last three years (I know, officially it’s over, but tell that to the millions of un- and underemployed people scraping by).

One of the great things about American governance is that the individual states retain a lot of power, so many of them are taking matters into their own hands and planning a reversion to currency that really is worth something: gold and silver. Ralph Benko reports on the trend for the Christian Science Monitor:

Why are so many state legislators beginning to call for issuance of a form of gold money?

The Constitution prohibits states from coining money but allows them to make “gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” By prohibiting everything except “gold and silver Coin” the Constitution clearly considers gold and silver coinage to be legitimate, no matter who issues it.

States haven’t issued currency in any form for more than a hundred years. So why now? Disgust is probably the answer. Various state legislators are disgusted by the federal government’s promiscuous dollar-printing. Accordingly, legislators in a dozen states are contemplating legislation to issue gold or silver-based currencies, including Utah, South Carolina, Virginia and New Hampshire.

The transcript of the debates in the original Constitutional Convention shows that the attitude of the Founders toward paper money was one of contempt. One delegate, Roger Sherman, called for the insertion of an absolute prohibition against states issuing their own paper money.

Sherman’s argument prevailed, as the Founder’s decided that the states would not possess the power to “emit bills of credit, nor make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts” making these prohibitions absolute…

As for the federal government, the earliest drafts of the Constitution included language permitting the federal government to issue unbacked paper money. But this language would not survive the final draft.

Many of the Founders objected strongly to this power. The objections were summed up by delegate Oliver Ellsworth, who sought to “shut and bar the door against paper money.”

“Paper money can in no case be necessary,” Ellsworth argued, “The power [to issue it] may do harm, never good.”

Since most of the Founders agreed, the federal government was also denied the power to issue non-convertible paper money. The federal government mostly operated within these constraints – the main exception being the Civil War, when saving the Union took precedence over all other considerations.

But for most of American history, dollars have been convertible into gold or silver. It is a 20th century innovation to have non-convertible currency. In 1932, FDR denied US citizens the right to convert their dollars into gold by US citizens. Then, in 1971, Richard Nixon denied foreign central banks the right to convert their dollars into gold…

[continues in the Christian Science Monitor]

Once again, the Xtranormal.com platform is being put to good use to elucidate exactly what’s happening:

Each segment has information that I found useful, especially the fact that there is actually no physical silver left in circulation — nice touch. Part II is here and part III available here.

Part IV is here, and after the creators accidentally deleting the original voices, the bear in the overalls is now sounding strangely like John Lennon.

Another source of information and a more detailed breakdown on basic market manipulation and arbitrage is available here. The site that appears to be the sponsor/creators of the Xtranormal videos silvergoldsilver.blogspot.com is less clear, but has information as well.

Lastly, the folks at Stand for Delivery have created a site dedicated to demanding delivery of their physical silver purchases, to in effect call the larger bluff of the market, if in fact there is a bluff occuring.

To my untrained financial brain, this is difficult to follow, but on the surface is seems like a likely scenario — it’s simply a different flavor of Ponzi scheme that is dovetailing with the desire for many to remove the “volatility” of the dollar (i.e. make it easier to manipulate) and move towards a a new federal or global currency, depending on who you are listening to.

Not such a wild scenario if you trace the de-evolution of the financial marketplace in a time where the new economy manufactures nothing, creates nothing and builds nothing — the new market only manipulates financials or other investors in order to generate revenue for long enough to avoid detection and then move on to the next area of vulnerability. “That’s called trading” you say — yes, but in the past even if you were burned by a more skilled trader, you would still have the physical performance of the company to rely on an even minimal performance or return — the change is that now we are rendering entire market segments into obsolescence by focusing only on 100% speculative market manipulations.

Remember the coming Biotech stock bubble? Turns out those were too complex to inflate and raid, which is why that cycle of hyperinflation never “caught on”.

If you have more knowledge of this topic, please sound off in the comments, everyone could benefit from as much trained knowledge as possible on this one.

According to Keiser, the goal of the “Crash JP Morgan – Buy Silver!” campaign is to force JP Morgan to cover its negative bets. He claims “There’s no way they can cover their liabilities if we all buy 1 silver coin and demand physical delivery.”

The charges that JP Morgan has been manipulating the silver market are not new. Back in May the New York Post reported on a federal investigation and just this month a class action law suit was commenced alleging that around June 2008, when JP Morgan acquired Bear Stearns and its short positions in silver futures, JP Morgan and another bank, HSBC, conspired to manipulate the market for silver futures and options contracts for their own benefit. Read more about that in the Telegraph.

• The trouble with being a contrarian is that you can never be quite contrarian enough. We began having doubts about the ‘feds inflate…gold soars’ hypothesis last year. It was too easy…too obvious. And if it were that easy to inflate a nation’s currency, how come the Japanese couldn’t get the hang of it in the ’90s?
• Inflation, yes…but not for a while. And gold? Well, we are in it for the long run. In the short run, anything could happen.
• To clarify our view on gold, The Daily Reckoning is not bearish on the metal. It is not bullish on the metal either. It is buggish. We are gold bugs. In the long run, gold will retain its value. Since that’s all we ask of it, we are always satisfied. Even if it is down in the short run – and it went through an 18-year down cycle from 1980 to 1998 – it will come back in the long run.
• A wave of risk aversion swept through global markets, triggering massive technical selling in the precious metals.
• Bullion tumbled more than 4 percent in heavy trade, briefly falling below $1,060 an ounce as escalating sovereign debt fears in Europe prompted investors to bid up the dollar and unload riskier assets.

The “experts” are having trouble explaining the movements in the precious metals markets because they just can’t comprehend a debt-based monetary system.

The process that the Federal Reserve, or any bank, uses to create money “consists of making an entry in a book, that is all,” says Graham Towers, governor of the Bank of Canada. “Each and every time a bank makes a loan (a debt) . . . new bank credit is created—brand new money.”

There is just no limit to the amount of monopoly those scoundrels behind the Federal Reserve can create out of “thin air” that they use to manipulate the dollar on the foreign exchange market and the precious metals at the Comex.

You are free to blame them for keeping investors from being wealthy while everyone else is out of work, out of hope and living in tent cities, but be sure and thank them for postponing the greatest calamity the world has ever seen.

When The Powers That Be can no longer keep the precious metals from taking off and the dollar from landing at zero, look out, Mad Max and the breakdown of society is around the corner: This is an Ominous Neutral Sign.

Previous article at disinfo: Ominous Signs Are Aligned: Not A Particularly Good Sign

Coming soon: An Oily Obaminous Sign

The end of our consumer society is on the horizon, which should be no surprise to anyone who took Economics 101. Do we really expect to spend our way out of this mess by buying and selling each other useless cheap stuff from China?

As the financial collapse gathers steam, gold and silver oracles like Butler, Friedman, Morgan and Turk who have been predicting for years the launch of the price of silver to the moon will see their prophecy fulfilled, but a celebration is not in order.

Being wealthy during the last 60 years of unprecedented prosperity at the expense of the Third World and the environment is one thing, but profiting from a bull market in silver when millions of hungry Americans are living in tent-cities next door is quite another.

A default at the Comex that will ignite the explosion in the price of silver and gold is in progress. Investors turned away from the bullion and coin dealers who refuse to sell silver at the $9 paper price opened commodity futures brokerage accounts.  They hope to take delivery of the real thing–silver bars with serial numbers–at the manipulated price of $9 an ounce before the Comex has to shut down and admit they never had enough real silver.

Silver delivery at $9 per ounce is courtesy of The Shorts, the largest concentrated short position by four or less dealers in financial history.

Ted Butler, a brilliant researcher, has been writing about the concentrated short position in silver for years and initially thought the default at Comex would come when the dealers ran out of liquidity, but his research suggested otherwise: “Even when holding extremely large short positions and incurring massive unrealized paper losses, measuring in the many hundreds of millions of dollars, the dealers have never collectively turned tail and bought back their short positions to the upside.”

Shorts to Comex and the regulators: The dramatic price decline in August from $21 to $9 is our parting gift to you for looking the other way during our obvious manipulation of prices in the War on Precious Metals. We had to prevent gold and silver from gaining legitimacy as stores of value or consumerism would not have become hyper-consumerism. Mopping up our mess will be easier at $9 instead of $21.

The Comex maintains a guarantee fund and insurance policy to meet a clearing member default, but it has only about $250 million, which is insufficient to cover the losses, but imagine a default at $50 or more per ounce.

Why has the price of silver historically been suppressed, stuck for years in the $4 to $5 trading range?

The downward price manipulation of silver caused by the excessive and uneconomic short position on the Comex has been the subject of most of Butler’s research. His explanation for market fluctuations are often greed-and-profit but he just as often contradicts himself and writes:  “It is my contention that this uniquely large and concentrated short position in silver explains why the price is still cheap. Therefore, in spite of the open losses the shorts are experiencing and the great profits accruing to silver investors, the price manipulation is still in place.” James R. Cook, president of Investment Rarities, credits Ted Butler for the vast majority of investment silver purchased in the past seven years, but when Cook asks the obvious question, “Isn’t the manipulated downward price consistent with a strategy to encourage the purchase of silver?”, Ted is unable to provide a greed-and-profit motive and repeats what has become his mantra,  “My main motive has been and still remains doing what I can to end this manipulative crime in progress.”

It is manipulative and it is a crime, but Ted Butler is unable to consistently support a profit motive because there isn’t one. The Puppet Masters manipulate the paper price of the precious metals downward to prevent gold and silver from gaining legitimacy as stores of value instead of the fiat currencies we call money.

Behind every consumer society is the reality of a credit-based monetary system and a fiat currency.  There is not enough gold and silver in the world to back the trillions of dollars required for the industrial revolution and the global consumer economy. Behind every fiat currency is a Federal Reserve or a Central Bank controlled by the same men: Rothschild, Rockefeller, Kuhn, Loeb, and Ted Butler’s prime suspect in the “ongoing intentional not accidental” great crime of keeping the price of silver low so investors can “buy a lot more metal”: JP Morgan Chase. “The paper margin calls and technical selling in silver was intentionally planned and forced on us by those who held big short positions.”

One of the more absurd notions that found its way into the history books and the writings of economic experts is that somehow these men were made wealthier from the Monopoly money they printed, the same money that enabled consumers to buy houses, cars, furniture and electronics, i.e. the cheap “stuff” we use on a daily basis. Recall that in 1910 these men already controlled one-sixth of the entire world’s wealth, and it was real wealth: gold, silver and raw materials in a world before we had a “throw away” mentality and the planet’s ecological structures were still in balance.

The Federal Reserve puppet masters orchestrated the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970’s and the dot-com and the housing market bubbles, all of which resulted in unprecedented prosperity.

Consumers can thank the puppet masters for all that “stuff” they have because as Ron (sound money) Paul puts it,  “Our current system gives us a free ride, our paper (fiat) buys cheap goods from overseas, and foreigners risk all by financing our extravagance.”

Thank them also for the unprecedented environmental damage and pollution caused by our hyper-consumer society.

We have consumed the resources of our planet; and it’s time for a change to a sustainable, non-consumer society. When people still had jobs and weren’t scared to go shopping, I recommended The Story of Stuff but, thanks to the financial meltdown, consumerism is on the way out, so now the video to watch is the sequel:  The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.

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Robert Singer is an Entrepreneur and the author of a forthcoming book on the Federal Reserve. His articles cover politics and the financial and environmental implications of our consumer society.  The articles have been main headlined and can be found on numerous popular websites: Marketoracle, Silverseek, Goldseek, disinformation.com, Daylife, LAprogressive, Canadafreepress, Opednews, Daily.pk and many of the Wordpress sites. Richard Daughty, The Mogambo Guru, proclaimed him a Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR).