This is an industry wide issue and has a number of causes, some of them not above board or essentially illegal. Eventually, these activities will run their course and solid companies like Metanor will recover and go well beyond past highs.

Here is a post by someone called Philman on these issues:

"No less an "in-the-know person", than John Reade, the analyst over at UBS, who has proven to be right, many times before, says that gold buying is now going wild at $800 or so per troy ounce. UBS happens to be the world's largest bullion bank, so they see what the real gold demand is, right now. He is predicting $900 by the end of this month. I'm sure that the manipulators will try to stop that from happening, but, so what?

The Fed and their client banks don't have unlimited resources. I, however, have unlimited time. I never buy on the foolish futures market, and I will hold my gold, and never sell. It will be inherited by my children. If they keep suppressing precious metals prices, I will buy more.

If they do keep suppressing the price, at the present rate, they will need real metal to do it, because they will soon run out of weak handed hedge funds to scare. If they are forced to use real metal, then the U.S. and European gold hoards will be reduced quickly, just as they wore out their silver hoards.

Just as they are forced to use fake-only claims for silver (because no metal is left at Fort Knox), they will also be forced to use fake-only claims for gold.

Besides, if you avoid a market because you are trading against the government, you couldn't invest in stocks, either. The manipulators not only manipulate gold and silver, but also the stock market. Anyone who thinks, for example, that stocks like Merrill Lynch would naturally surge on earnings report disasters, as they did, back in October, is very foolish indeed. What happened, then, was clearly the plunge protection team at work, trying to prop up ML and Citigroup and its other members share prices. The media reported it as "celebrating the fact that the losses weren't deeper." How stupid can you get. The stock market is obviously manipulated.

So far, this year, however, in spite of their best efforts to pump up the stock prices of their member firms, C, ML, GS, JPM and all the others have depreciated more than any commodity. PPT member, Bear Stearns, depreciated from $150 per share, almost down to zero, for example. Stockholders were lucky to get $10 per share. At one point, they were only going to get $2. One or two of these big banks will go bankrupt before this credit crisis is over. Even the former Chief Economist of the IMF says so.

In short, the manipulators are not all-powerful, and they can and do lose. After the lawsuits are launched, and are successful, eventually justice will prevail, a lot of wrongdoers will go to jail, others will pay billions in damages. It will become very difficult to create paper-fake gold and silver, once the rules are enforced.

So, as far as I can see, if you are looking long term, and don't get sore over the temporary attacks, the future of the precious metals is very bright. Besides, it is only a matter of time before the Fed and other Central Banks realize that gold and silver are not direct threats to paper money unless they cause it to happen with stupid policies of endless money printing. They can increase the value of paper money, honestly, simply by not printing as much. They don't need to attack gold and silver, even though, right now, they apparently think that they do."