Lots of Investigations into the Manipulation of the Gold Market

I think the central banks are a part of it. There’s no doubt about that. There’s a great book written by Dimitri Speck called ‘The Gold Cartel.’ And he indicated that gold manipulation started on August 5th, 1993, basically led by central banks for the purpose of maintaining credibility of their currencies. They had this theory that if they keep gold down no one will be concerned about owning fiat money.

But I think laterally it’s the manipulation has obviously been amongst the commercial banks. I think they figured out that with their very deep pockets that they can kind of overrun the natural buyers of paper gold and force the price to do what they wanted. And I’ve discussed many times I think they play this game in the options market where they cause their customers who are long options to lose the premiums constantly, and every option expiry the price of gold goes down. So I think it’s transferred itself over to the commercial banks.

Luckily, we have a number of investigations going on, whether it’s in Britain, or Germany, not so much the US. But there’s lots of investigations into manipulation of the gold market.

So today I think it’s a combination of both the central banks and the commercial banks perhaps working in cahoots. Because let’s face it, the central banks by their zero interest rate policy and printing of money have kept the banking industry in a profitable position much to the detriment, of course, of the public and savers, because you can’t get any return on your money any more.

- Eric Sprott via a recent Ask The Expert interview