Big Banks Are Trying to Keep Gold Under Control, and Silver Is the Easier Target
Mario Innecco told Kitco News that inflation came in hot at 3.7 percent and both metals fell anyway.
Gold dropped as much as $80. Silver fell more than 5 percent. The professional market reaction was that higher inflation means the Federal Reserve will tighten more, raising the opportunity cost of holding metal. Innecco said that view is short sighted. From 1981 to 2021 the bond market was in a bull market and rates kept falling. Now the bond market is in a bear market. The last time that happened, gold rose from $35 to nearly $900. Today the 10 year yield is above 5 percent and gold is still above $4,000. The market is misreading what high rates mean once the multi decade decline in yields has ended.
He has watched the same pattern for more than twenty years. When he first started following Kitco charts in 2002, he noticed that gold and silver were repeatedly sold at the same time every day. Around 1:20 or 1:30 London time, which is roughly when the COMEX opens, the metals were hit hard. In the bond market he worked in for two decades, sell offs do not always arrive on the same clock. In precious metals they do.
“Yes, I think they are putting pressure on him. They put particular pressure on silver because silver is easier to manipulate. If you manipulate silver, it becomes easier to push gold down.”
Innecco said the pressure is deliberate. Traders who operate in the paper market know the levels where new buyers will step in. They can lean on those levels. Many participants are only trading for paper profits. Few are actually selling physical metal. The drop, in his view, is an opportunity for people who want to accumulate real ounces rather than a signal that the bull market is over.
“There are people who trade in the market and somewhat manipulate securities prices. They know the levels at which people will start entering the market.”
He does not trust the official CPI as a clean measure of inflation. From his perspective, inflation is the growth of the money supply and credit. The Fed stopped publishing M3 twenty years ago. The CPI methodology was changed in 2022 so that items in the basket can be replaced more frequently. That makes the headline number easier to manage. Real inflation, measured by money and credit growth, is higher. That is the backdrop against which the paper market is still being used to keep gold and silver from rising as fast as the monetary conditions would suggest.
The same dynamic shows up in silver’s lag. Silver is the smaller, less liquid market. It is easier to push around with paper. Once silver is under pressure, gold becomes easier to contain as well. Innecco has seen the pattern long enough to treat the repeated COMEX open selling as more than coincidence. Physical holders are not the ones liquidating. The paper market is the one being used to manage the price while the underlying monetary and debt conditions continue to deteriorate.
“I bet few people are actually selling their physical gold and silver, and if anything, this is probably an opportunity to continue snapping up more and hoarding gold and silver.”
The claim is not that every dip is engineered. It is that the consistent timing, the relative ease of moving silver, and the knowledge of technical levels allow large paper players to keep both metals under tighter control than the fundamentals alone would produce.
For Innecco, that is the practical definition of manipulation in the current market. The physical metal is still being accumulated by those who want ounces, not paper. The paper market is where the pressure is applied.
