They are not even trying to hide the gold manipulation these days. You would think with the recent spotlight on gold price fixing and lawsuit filed in March, the manipulators would at least retreat into the shadows for a few months. But this is not the case, as they chose tax day for the largest slam down of 2014.
This action is clearly not-for-profit selling, which can only be interpreted as price manipulation. The regulators are bought off and/or appointed by the banks that are doing the manipulating. Long-term investors of physical metals need not worry too much about this action, but those trying to play the futures market or hedge positions are getting scalped.
Zerohedge.com reports:
It seems the two words “fiduciary duty” are strangely missing from the dictionary of the new normal’s asset management community. This morning, shortly before 8:27am ET, someone decide that it was the perfect time to dump thousands of Gold futures contracts worth over half a billion dollars notional. This smashed Gold futures down over $12 instantaneously, breaking below the 200DMA and triggered the futures exchange to halt trading in the precious metal for 10-seconds. Palladium also got clobbered and was also halted. This is gold’s worst since Bernanke ‘tapered’ in December.
As Nanex exposes in great detail…
1. June 2014 Gold (GC) Futures on April 15, 2014 Note the 10 second halt.
