The historic decline this week in silver creates strong emotion. Watching great amounts of wealth disappear, quite literally in minutes amid disorderly trading conditions is a genuine fear for any investor. Worse is seeing no obvious legitimate reason to explain the carnage. If that doesn’t scare you, nothing will. Especially if you already harbored unease about how the whole silver market operated.
But fear is an emotion that burns out fairly quickly. A human being can’t stay in an intense state of fear of financial catastrophe without selling out at some point or mentally adjusting to the new level of price. Then the conditions that led to the fear in the first place are replaced by some other emotion. If evidence exists that the sudden financial loss could and should have been prevented, the new emotion becomes one of anger. Anger at who or what might have caused the loss and who should have prevented it. I think there is compelling evidence pointing to who and what caused this silver crash as well as who should have prevented it.
The first thing we must recognize is that this was an unusually intense price smash. Silver fell 30% for the week, its biggest price loss in 31 years. The decline was highlighted by record trading volume on the COMEX and in shares of SLV. From any objective measure, the trading was disorderly, indicating little true liquidity despite the record volume. That’s because much of the trading was conducted by high frequency trading (HFT) computer bots whose clear purpose seems to be to cause disruptions to prices. These are the same disruptive traders that caused the flash crash in the stock market last year. I believe it was these traders who started the price decline with the $6 hit in 12 minutes on last Sunday evening. Their primary reason for existence seems to be causing prices to collapse. (read more)
