Juggling Dynamite

“Russia has been showing the world glistening scenes of the Winter Olympics. It’s a rare opportunity to brighten a national image that often skates on the thin ice of corruption. One authority estimates that 20 percent of the Russian economy is skimmed by graft and a lot of that by government officials. It may be that no one knows more about this than American-born businessman Bill Browder.

Browder tells a story of thievery, vengeance and death worthy of a Russian novel. He’s a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin and he has torn a rift between Moscow and Washington. When you hear what he has to say about Russia you’ll know why Russia thinks of Bill Browder as an enemy of the state.” Here is a direct video link.

Wolfgang Beltracchi fooled the experts for decades in an art scam that netted him and his partners millions of dollars. Many art experts acknowledge he is the most successful art forger in this and, perhaps, any other time in history. Here is a direct video link.

There are mountains of evidence that investment banks and other participants have been price-fixing, hoarding, trading on non-public information,front-running, pumping and dumping pretty much every financial asset and market on the earth over the past several years. I have no doubt they have been up to the same antics in the gold market as well.

Trouble is most market participants have a long-side bias: they only complain about manipulation when the assets they hold drop in value. They never complain when asset prices surge in value courtesy of the exact same culprits and activities; and yet high price is the very essence of investment risk. When Gold was $1900 and silver near $50, one didn’t hear the precious metal chorus screaming about manipulation then. Oh no, at that point, after prices had soared 660% over 10 years, precious metals bugs were delighted to explain the rational reasons for all those gains and many more that they predicted. All very justified fundamentals according to them. But after prices plunged into the 1100’s in 2013, why then it was all about routing out the evil “manipulators” they alleged were causing the downside.

We are reminded of President Hoover’s call for investigation by the Senate into the short-sellers he admonished as having caused the crash of 1929, but with no similar inquiry requested about all the risk-sellers who pumped asset markets to financially suicidal levels leading up to the crash. Human behavior is nothing if not predictable…

The London gold fix, the benchmark used by miners, jewelers and central banks to value the metal, may have been manipulated for a decade by the banks setting it, researchers say. Here is a direct video link.