SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - GDP Disappoints

GDP came in light today and the markets move lower, although they were able to shrug off the news.

Volumes remain light, and the markets remain gamed.

Volatility is complacent.

Net Asset Value Premiums of Certain Precious Metal Trusts and Funds

Premiums remain thin.

I think today is the obligatory post-expiration gut check for the metals.

Let's see how we close and how it goes next week.

Read Taibbi's piece posted early about the latest market rigging scandal.

When the rigging in the metals is revealed it may be a 'career ender' and an 'exchange breaker.'

Matt Taibbi: Everything Is Rigged - The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

“The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more, and tolerated by all.”

Tacitus

There are more scandals to come.   Wall Street is now a pathological environment, and the City of London is as bad or worse.

When someone raises their voice over these abuses they are often met with stony denial and ridicule.  That is the credibility trap at work.  Those who owe their positions to the system, as corrupt as it may be, feel the need to defend it rather than reform it.

There will be no sustainable recovery until the system is reformed.  

Rolling Stone
Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
By Matt Taibbi
April 25, 2013

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps...

All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings ­ in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP ­ are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati ­ this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.


Read the entire story here.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Voilà, Les Jeux Sont Faits

"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will knock down everything that stands in its way."

Émile Zola

Gold and silver rallied sharply today from their deeply oversold condition, which remained so even after several days of steady increases.

Today was option expiration on the Comex and it was quiet. After the recent bloodbath I cannot imagine it would be otherwise.  If I were of a manipulative mind I would hit the metals again hard tomorrow.

But I hear that this recent market operation has put a dent in the physical bullion under the control of one of the Fed's favorite banks, so that might be a dangerous play, and a risk of a run on the bullion banks.

GDP for Q1 tomorrow.

This seems to be a season for scandals. 

First it has been shown that the bulwark of austerity, the work of Rogoff and Reinhart, was not only mistaken in its Excel spreadsheet, but it was also highly selective in its use of data. 

So much so that an unbiased examination of the data shows that not only is their hypothesis not proven, it is proven false! And Reinhart is working for the Peterson Institute.

After all the crowing with the paper smash of gold and silver, and the widespread glee that investors were rejecting it, in fact there have been widespread shortages of actual gold and silver bullion available for sale. 

And there is still no heavy buying from the general public.  Ownership is still narrowly concentrated in those who follow money and financial matters.  That type of broader buying may be to come, but it has not happened yet. 

The open interest and other data show it was largely a bear raid driven by the manipulation of the markets in off hours using tried and true manipulative techniques of gaming the system.

What wonders and revelations will the future bring?

Intraday commentary regarding what may be behind the hysterical antagonism towards gold and silver here.