The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission today issued two orders filing and settling charges against former precious metals traders at separate financial institutions who entered into formal cooperation agreements with the CFTC’s Division of Enforcement (Division) and admitted to spoofing and manipulative conduct in the futures markets.

I wish to ask the Minister a number of questions.

First of all, let me say that gold price suppression (“fixing,” “rigging,” “manipulating” or however else you want to think about it) is not just a conspiracy theory. It’s a well-documented phenomenon, with real actors and real ramifications. In 2014, Barclays was fined nearly $44 million for failing to prevent traders from manipulating the London gold “fix.” Late last year, a former JPMorgan trader pleaded guilty to manipulating the U.S. metals markets. Remember the gold futures “flash crash” of 2014?

Traders from across the U.S. are banding together to accuse J. P. Morgan Chase of manipulating precious metals markets for years.

At least six lawsuits, all making similar allegations against the nation’s largest bank, have been filed in New York federal court in the past month, since federal prosecutors in Connecticut unveiled a plea agreement with a former J. P. Morgan Chase metals trader.

An ex-J.P. Morgan Chase trader has admitted to manipulating the U.S. markets of an array of precious metals for about seven years -- and he has implicated his supervisors at the bank.

The market rigging has gone on so long it’s obvious now, and as you say the wait will require free markets re-emerging.

Why is this important? Because despite what everyone tells you to the contrary, markets are controlled, and Gold and Silver in particular. Technicals, sentiment, and positioning are important tools, but you need to be aware of the risk of manipulation undermining the message these tools are telling you.

So why bother with such tools at all? Why buy Gold or Silver? The banks use the same tools we do to determine when to force prices lower, which is why their behavior is predictable. Second, manipulation has an expiration date, as demonstrated in the 2000s and 1970s in particular. They cannot stop metal prices going up forever, and you want to be around for when Gold and Silver soar next. They are the most undervalued assets out there today. Plus, I follow the smart money. And China, Russia, and JP Morgan have been loading up on physical metals for years now. Central banks around the world are also repatriating their Gold from the U.S. in preparation for some major event to come. I want to be long, too, when that event occurs.

In summary, manipulation in metals is undeniable. It has become so chronic that it is now obvious and therefore predictable. Unfortunately, it can temporarily undermine or render traditional analytical tools as useless. You need to be aware of this to protect yourself when it is about to happen again, because it will.

A former UBS Group AG precious metals trader was found not guilty on Wednesday of scheming to manipulate futures markets through a practice known as spoofing.

The former trader initially faced six additional charges of commodities fraud and substantive spoofing, but those counts were thrown out by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Meyer, who found they should’ve been brought in Chicago where the alleged illegal trades were executed.

Prosecuting banks and traders for price manipulation on COMEX futures while ignoring the far larger London market and its gold and silver fixings looks like a job half done. Trading desks and their traders are agnostic to trading venues and with interlinked markets, the COMEX and the London Fixings are two sides of the same coin.

With blatant evidence that the same banks and traders were involved in both markets, and with actual chat room transcripts now confirming that precious metals traders across multiple banks were colluding in fixing price manipulation, then why are their no active regulatory investigations of trader manipulation of the London Gold and Silver Fixings?

Is it because of lack of jurisdictional authority or are the regulators and criminal enforcement agencies such as the FCA, DoJ, FINMA and the German BAFIN too terrified of opening a can of worms into the huge liabilities that would arise from proving a decade long criminal manipulation of the London Gold and Silver price benchmarks and that were used throughout the world the value everything from ISDA contracts to institutional precious metals products, to ETFs.