If you were writing a paranoid fantasy of gold price manipulation you'd be hard pressed to come up with something more on the nose than the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority's order against Barclays. It has everything; it is the benchmark of manipulation by which all future manipulation will be measured. Well, this or Libor. Delightfully, this manipulation occurred on June 28, 2012, the day after Barclays was fined 290 million pounds for manipulating Libor. They just really wanted to perfect their manipulating technique.