Who's selling today, and selling what... metal or paper? Journalists won't ask

Market analysts are searching for an explanation for today's bombing of gold and silver prices. For example, the Wall Street Journal today wrote the following:

The sudden fall in gold and silver prices lacks a clear trigger, XTB research director Kathleen Brooks writes. ...

The fall is likely caused by stretched valuations and signals that U.S. CPI data could be softer than expected, she adds. 

A slide in prices isn't necessarily a bad thing as it shows that investors aren't getting too far ahead of themselves and that there is a limit to gold's exuberance, Brooks writes. While the decline has been more severe than expected, the fundamentals propelling gold and silver upward remain, she adds.

Unfortunately, this search will not extend to the connections between central banks, bullion banks, and their daily and usually surreptitious interventions in the markets, both buying and selling, to defend their currencies against market forces. 

A summary of the long history of this intervention against gold, in recent years undertaken most often with derivatives, is here.

Gold and silver have been rising with strange haste recently, and by conventional measures can be said to be very "overbought."

But who knows and will report which entities were selling today, and exactly what they were selling -- real metal or paper derivatives? What journalist will telephone a central bank or a bullion bank with an inconvenient question and report his inability to get an answer?

Even when events in the monetary metals markets are as much lacking a "clear trigger" as today's, no mainstream financial journalist dares to ask inconvenient questions about gold to anyone, much less powerful institutions.

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