Mike Gleason: Well, Chris, we think some people owe you and GATA an apology. You have been making the case for manipulation of gold and silver prices since GATA was formed in 1999, but lots of people dismissed everything you had to say. We now have incontrovertible proof of multiple banks and multiple traders running a decade-long scheme to “spoof” prices.

There are guilty pleas and piles of evidence exposing a scheme which involved thousands of bogus trades. We know senior people were training more junior employees on how to rig prices. The Department of Justice is going to prosecute using RICO laws because attorneys there can see this is organized crime. But somehow, it doesn't look like the apologies will be coming anytime soon.

The same people who openly mocked the idea of price rigging a year or two ago now want us to believe that this sort of cheating is really just par for the course in any market. Bankers will be bankers – we should just expect they will occasionally cheat a little. They want everyone to know these markets are free and fair for the most part. At this point, I think it's safe to assume that no amount of evidence could persuade them otherwise.

Why do you think people still refuse to acknowledge just how crooked these markets are? Wouldn't most of these manipulation skeptics be better off if the markets were actually free and fair?

Chris Powell: Well, many people in the markets, Mike, and many people in the mainstream financial news media are dependent on ignoring this stuff. If people begin to realize that the markets are so heavily rigged, they're not going to participate in them as much, and certainly, they're not going to pay as much attention to the traditional market analysis that we're provided with people trying to compare chart patterns and drawing lines and waves and everything like that.

Well, if we're really just looking at holograms because people behind the scenes are rigging the markets, people, they're going to lose faith in a lot of businesses and a lot of analysts. And I certainly understand why people are very reluctant to acknowledge this stuff. If they acknowledge it, they're basically admitting that everything they've been telling people for years has been a lie or at least erroneous.

But we're, of course, enjoying the Justice Department's description of the JP Morgan Chase metals desk as a criminal organization, and we're enjoying all the indictments of the traders at these big investment banks. But we're the first to admit that we've been going after bigger game for a long time.

As reprehensible as this market rigging by the investment banks is, we've been concentrating on the market rigging by governments and central banks, and I think the indictments we've had so far are probably just a distant reflection of the rigging by the governments and central banks. I think that some of this rigging that has resulted in indictments and convictions is possibly front-running of government trades that have been undertaken by the investment banks fronting for central banks and governments.

But it's not the big stuff we're after. We're after exposing the interventions of governments and central banks, particularly in the gold and silver markets. But with all this repo stuff going on, there's no telling if there's any end to their rigging.

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https://www.moneymetals.com/podcasts/2019/10/25/attacks-on-gold-silver-prices-lose-impact-001894