NO MANIPULATION AFTER ALL?
The best way of determining whether there is anything wrong in silver is to do a controlled experiment by removing it from the equation (along with any mention of JPMorgan) and substitute any other world commodity or entity in its place. In other words, would it be outrageously illegal or no big deal if what is transpiring in silver occurred in any other commodity? Pick any commodity like corn, copper or crude oil with an active futures derivatives market and plug in the facts that are known to have existed in COMEX silver over the past ten years.
We know from the Commitment of Traders Report (COT) that a single entity has held a consistently large concentrated short position in COMEX silver that’s larger in terms of actual world production than in any other commodity. We further know that this large entity has always been the largest futures market short in COMEX silver over the entire decade; never flipping to net long. Next we know from COT data that its short position has both expanded and contracted regularly over the years and – get this – it has never lost money as it added or bought back short COMEX futures contracts. Never a loss, always only gains, a stunningly perfect trading record. Finally we know, from data published in the Bank Participation report, that the dominant short seller in COMEX silver is a large U.S. bank.
You should now be envisioning a dominant futures market short seller in corn, copper or crude oil being consistently short for a decade with a perfect trading record – never suffering a loss and only having made profits from the short side. Wouldn’t you be at least a little suspicious that something was wrong or that the market was rigged? What if I told you that the same single dominate futures market short seller had spent the last seven years acquiring a massive physical hoard of the same commodity? Wouldn’t this sound like the perfect commodity price manipulation – the manipulator depressing the paper side and then using its price influence to buy the physical side in massive quantities at depressed prices?
What if I told you that there was a federal regulator, the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), and a self-regulating entity the CME Group (COMEX), whose mandate was to prevent such a scheme and that neither one has said anything about any of this for five years. Oh, and the financial institution identified as the big silver manipulator, JPMorgan, hasn’t said a peep about being publicly accused of criminal wrongdoing. If these facts were present in any other commodity, would this constitute manipulation? Would the facts be sufficient enough to require the CFTC, the CME, and JPMorgan to explain why manipulation doesn’t exist?
The real wild card in this manipulation is what JPMorgan will do on the next price rally. As a consequence of acquiring massive amounts of physical silver and gold (some 700 million ounces and 20 million ounces respectively), there is absolutely no way JPM could not prosper immensely on a price explosion. In fact, JPMorgan may be in the best position it has ever been in as a result of holding its largest net long position in silver and gold. I suppose, as has happened every other time JPMorgan has been in this position in the past that this most crooked bank could cap prices again in order to keep adding physical silver and gold to its already historic holdings.
In the event that JPMorgan decides that now is the time to let her rip, then a number of things come to mind, such as woe to those net short and good luck in trying to quickly assemble a reasonably-priced long position. Nowadays, using the recent sudden and sharp increase in stock market volatility as a current example, things can change in a hurry. More to the point the price of silver not only can explode, it should explode, given everything known about a vital and strategic commodity artificially depressed in price for decades.
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