The answer is that there really is no true market for gold, just a rigged game consisting of physical gold and paper gold trading side by side as if they were one and the same.

In some ways, this doesn’t matter, because regulators have shown no appetite to enforce the law. The message to manipulators is that this is a big boy’s market and players can do whatever they want as long as it’s not too blatant.

More broadly, where does the price of gold go from here?

It is my understanding the CME ruled yesterday’s silver flash crash excessive, and repriced all trades below $15.45 to this more fair price. Well ironically enough, although last night silver bounced back to $16, this morning in the aftermath of the flash crash, silver traded down below last night’s adjusted low, proving once again, there is no such thing as a bad tick.

But this doesn’t explain why someone would choose to sell a whack of silver futures at 6pm. It wasn’t like it was a badly traded 100 lot. More than 6,000 futures traded. Why on earth would anyone need to sell almost half a billion dollars of silver at the most illiquid time of the day? It almost makes me sympathetic to the tinfoil hat wearing precious metal bulls who are convinced governments are nefariously conspiring to keep gold and silver down.

Silver futures prices on the COMEX futures trading platform briefly plummeted at approximately 7:06am Singapore time yesterday, with the price for the front month (most active) September silver contract falling from a US$16.06 quote down to a low of US$14.34 all within a 1 minute interval. The futures price then recovered nearly all of its losses in the subsequent 2-3 minute period. High to low, this COMEX silver futures contract saw its price fall by just over 10.7%, before rebounding nearly 11%.

During this time when the COMEX price crashed, there was nothing fundamentally happening in the wider financial markets, or indeed in the physical silver market, to justify these price gyrations in COMEX silver futures prices. Which all goes to show that the COMEX ‘paper’ futures silver prices is completely detached from the physical silver market, and that COMEX silver futures prices have no anchoring in the real silver market.

In his court plea, Liew described working with others at his own bank and at two other operations. He refers to “The Legend,” without naming him, at another unidentified global bank. Many details are cloaked. Liew himself is described as a trader for Bank A, which a person familiar with the situation said is Deutsche Bank AG.

According to the documents, at least two senior colleagues taught Liew how small orders could be placed and then quickly pulled, pushing prices in a direction to benefit traders with client orders to fill. Within a couple years, he was teaching newer traders to do the same. In all, according to the filings, he attempted to move prices on Chicago’s CME more than 300 times before he left.

A trader who conspired to manipulate futures contracts in precious metals committed those actions while working at Deutsche Bank AG, according to a person familiar with the matter, and he is now cooperating with prosecutors.

The trader, David Liew, pleaded guilty to fraud on Thursday in federal court in Chicago for his role in the spoofing of contracts for gold, silver, platinum and palladium, according to court papers. Along with spoofing which is placing orders without the intent of executing them in an attempt to manipulate the price he also acknowledged front-running customers’ orders.

Liew’s cooperation suggests more headaches for Deutsche Bank and its traders. Liew worked on his own but also with at least three other traders at the bank to coordinate spoofing hundreds of times, practices he said he learned from his co-workers, according to court documents. Liew’s employer is described as Bank A in the plea agreement and identified as Deutsche Bank by the person familiar with the matter.

Barclays and three other banks told a New York federal court Monday that they didn't waste its time when requesting a second shot at tossing a case over their alleged conspiracy to manipulate the price of gold, saying investors' use of flawed data in the suit justifies a do-over.

Barclays Bank PLC, HSBC Bank PLC, Societe Generale, and the Bank of Nova Scotia again asked the court for permission to renew their dismissal bid, fighting against investors who say their suit still supports allegations of collusive trading even after admitting the complaint included flawed data analyses.

On the afternoon of April 11, London’s daily gold price benchmark fix took a peculiar turn: It was about $12 under the spot price. The auction appeared to be stuck on a descending escalator from an initial $1,265.75, before fixing at $1,252.90.

Based on documents in the public domain to which we refer below, we consider that there are good grounds to believe that members of six well-known financial services groups combined together to manipulate the outcome of the London Gold Fixing between about 2004 and 2014 and that members of four of those groups combined to manipulate the outcome of the London Silver Fixing between about 1999 and 2014. The effect of this was to create false market prices, in particular by artificially depressing prices after the 3pm (London time) Gold Price Fixing and to increase bid-offer spreads in physical gold, physical silver and their respective derivative instruments. The relevant institutions did this to increase their profits from their own activities in these markets at the expense of other market participants who have therefore suffered loss and damage, probably running into hundreds of millions of pounds in aggregate.

If it can be established that these financial institutions participated in price fixing then we consider that there can be little doubt that they have breached section 2 of the Competition Act 1998 and are liable to pay damages to any other market participant that suffered loss and damage as a result.

A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday revived three private antitrust lawsuits accusing JPMorgan Chase & Co of rigging a market for silver futures contracts traded on COMEX.

Deutsche Bank is a defendant in more than 7,000 lawsuits worldwide. In two of them it has recently agreed to settlements and is prepared to pay tens of millions of US dollars in restitution and fines. This includes the settling of lawsuits over gold and silver price manipulation. Associated court proceedings against other financial institutions are still underway.

Apart from Deutsche Bank, several other banks have been sued in New York over manipulation of precious metals prices as well. Due to a lack of direct evidence, the plaintiffs initially presented statistical evidence. Charts that show average intraday price movements have played an important role in this.