A very thoughtful article from Hard Assets laying out the other side of the manipulation & GATA story.

i think the final sentence of that article makes the most salient point:

"What we can say is that, so far, there's been no evidence put forth to indicate that banks' futures market trading has risen to the level of criminal activity."

so the best argument they could make is that we can't prove criminal activity on the part of the banks yet! is it any wonder that bernie madoff got away with his ponzi scheme for ten years? even when investigators are presented with mountains of evidence, they still don't accept it.

but as chris powell of gata says, they don't just have evidence now, they have admissions and confessions. bank and goverment officials have admitted to manipulating the futures markets, and it's in the public record. here is the link to an interview with bill murphy, chris powell and ed steer, in which three important points are made:

1) if trading in the futures markets is so profitable, why are only 2 or 3 banks on the short side, and not all of them? answer: because those are the ones in on the scam.

2) ben bernanke said that if the fed was audited it could result in the collapse of the us dollar. every public company has to be audited every year to verify that its financials are accurate, so why not the government, which is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people? answer: things can only be much worse than is commonly known: e.g. most of the gold supposedly in fort knox and west point repositories is gone, and much of what remains actually belongs to the german bank.

3) the current activity in the gold market, including imf gold sales, is being accomplished to re-allocate central bank gold worldwide so that the major central banks will be hedged against the inevitable decline of the us dollar. in other words, most of the west's gold is going to china to make up for the loss of purchasing power of its huge reserves of us dollars.

once that is in place, the boys from gata think gold will be revalued upward all at once on a friday evening with no warning. that makes as much sense as anything else i've heard.

http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Gold+_Broadcast/Entries/2009/7/2_GATA.html