Adam Taggart, colleague of market analyst Chris Martenson at the Peak Prosperity Internet site, today notes with some wonderfully annotated charts what he calls "Gold's Regular Morning Mugging" on the New York Commodities Exchange.
Of course this mugging was noted long ago by GATA consultant Dimitri Speck and the late GATA board member Adrian Douglas, who found that despite its great run up over the last decade gold almost always has gone down during Western market hours --
http://www.gata.org/node/8919
-- and Taggart draws conclusions similar to theirs.
"It's hard to swallow that these charts are evidence of a free and efficient market," Taggart writes. "Otherwise, a pattern this predictable would be quickly removed as traders and HFT algos piled in to a 'sure' bet.
"Instead, this is behavior one would expect to see if powerful interests wanted to suppress the price of gold: Hit the price hard and early at the start of the trading week to prevent the price from building upward momentum, as well as to make capital think twice before entering the gold market.
"Who is doing this selling at the market open? Is it TBTF ("too big to fail") banks making profit on large short positions? Is it the Fed, through proxies, keeping the gold price contained so as not to signal how badly QE is devaluing the dollar? Allegations swarm across the Internet that it's one of these -- or both. But we don't know for certain. The exchanges don't make that information available to the public.
"But while these charts are not enough evidence to prove that the gold price is being manipulated, they sure exhibit the symptoms one would expect to see if it is. So the big question is: If the precious metals market is being manipulated, is it wise to be in it?"
Taggart answers the question in the remainder of his commentary, "Gold's Regular Morning Mugging," posted at Peak Prosperity here:
http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/80953/gold...morning-mugging
