I just read two extremely interesting articles from the Mineweb site. These indicate that the western powers' gold cartel has lost power to negatively affect the gold price. China is now in the driver's seat and are touting gold as an investment vehicle to their masses, inducing ever more buying of the metal. The days of downward price manipulation of the yellow metal appear to be over.

Here are the links to the two articles. There are other articles linked within each of these articles. If you hover your mouse-pointer over some of the text, you will see it become underlined as an active link to the other articles.

One article is entitled China can no longer afford to let gold or silver price slump.

The other is entitled China's immense, and growing, impact on the global gold market.