Remember back in 2010 when Alex Jones and Max Keiser were trying to persuade people to wipe out JP Morgan by buying silver? And then in 2011 the New York Times got in on the act, describing a putative conspiracy by JPM and HSBC to manipulate the price of silver. Well nothing much has happened to develop the theory despite the megabank doing its best to blow itself up by allowing the London Whale’s massively rogue trading. Kevin McElroy of ETF Daily News says it was all baloney anyway:
I promised I would stay on top of the “silver manipulation” story – and there’s another wrinkle in this story to share. The Financial Times reported yesterday that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC: the federal government’s regulatory body in charge of U.S. commodities trading) will drop its investigation into silver futures manipulation.
Before I get into it, you might recall that the specter of the precious metals conspiracy theory goes back far beyond this latest story, and further back even than the Hunt brothers’ infamous plot to corner the market on silver in the early 1980s – which really happened, by the way.
