"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."

Your above statement indicates you have not read the article or looked at the charts other than the sentence concerning "criminal activity" . Remember I'm just the messenger. Try an analysis of the points contained in the article rather than using terms like Bernie Madoff & all the points which are not directed at the article from Hard Assets.

joltin, i wasn't criticizing you, just the article that tries to muddy the waters of the manipulation issue by presenting various shades of grey in what i believe is a black and white issue. most of my post was about the gata interview that i linked, and not a response to zigler's article, because i didn't break it up into two separate posts. for the record, i had actually seen zigler's article before you posted it, and i had dismissed it as not being worthy of adding to the discussion, so i didn't take the time to refute it point by point.

the internet is the only place you have heard about manipulation until very recently. the mainstream media have blackballed gata and its message for a decade, and there are still many in the hard money arena who don't believe in it (jon nadler, bob moriarty, adam hamilton, dennis gartman.)

zigler's article even admits that the central banks are leasing gold, but zigler says that's ok because it's their job. i see that as an exercise in semantics. he can think of that as managing the market, or intervening in the market, or interfering in the market, but i see it as manipulation. the damage done to the mining industry has been widespread. silver standard might be selling its silver for $20, 30 or even $50/oz today, instead of $13 and change, were it not for the machinations of the bankers. the smaller companies are in even worse shape, with junior producers being unprofitable, and exploration companies placing their properties on care and maintenance because they can't even afford to drill their projects.

somehow zigler misses the fact that a commodity cannot remain below its cost of production for years on end unless it is being manipulated. instead he says the price of gold can't be manipulated because its price has been rising for several years. once again, he misses the point that its price would be much, much higher if it were allowed to trade freely.

beyond the blizzard of statistics he presents, he never addresses the overriding question: where are the banks going to get the metal to repay the hundreds of millions of ounces they have borrowed and shorted? they may have taken corresponding long derivative positions that they think will cover their shorts, but there isn't any metal there. the mining companies aren't selling forward their future production, and have been de-hedging for years, so the banks don't have a prayer of covering their shorts. i think it is inevitable that they will have to settle in cash when the comex finally blows up, and when that happens, the losses will dwarf the $50 billion that bernie madoff stole.

finally, i would like to see the government take a more proactive stance when they have been warned about lawbreakers over and over. it doesn't matter whether it's the fbi being warned by a flight school that some arabs want to learn how to maneuver large airliners, but they don't want to learn how to take off or land, and the fbi ignores the warnings because there isn't enough evidence to prosecute. after the world trade center was destroyed they had more than enough evidence to prosecute. or the sec, which ignored ten years of warnings about bernie madoff. these government officials and regulators are very good at closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.

the only thing i am certain of is that after the comex blows up and the manipulation scam is finally brought to light, congress and the regulators will tell us that no one could have seen this coming. joltin, you can post whatever you want here, but this is one article we disagree on.