Many precious metals investors have heard about silver manipulation or suspected it, but few fully understand how it works or can clearly explain it. Many also intuitively sense that silver’s price is artificially low and should be much higher but struggle to identify what—or who—is keeping it suppressed. I have committed myself to studying silver price manipulation, documenting the evidence, educating others, and exposing these practices to bring them to an end and ensure justice is served. In this article, I will explain in clear and accessible terms how silver’s price is systematically manipulated and suppressed.
Simply put, the goal of silver price manipulation is to keep silver’s price artificially low as well as prevent it from breaking above key technical levels that could trigger a full-blown bull market. According to consensus within the precious metals community, the primary culprits behind silver price manipulation are the bullion banks—the most influential players in the precious metals market. These include major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, UBS, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs, several of which have been found guilty of manipulating precious metals markets—particularly gold and silver.
Bullion banks are typically members of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), the leading authority overseeing the global over-the-counter (OTC) precious metals market. As LBMA members, these banks play a central role in the market by acting as market makers, facilitating large trades, managing vaulting and storage, and participating in price-setting mechanisms such as the daily London Gold and Silver Fix. This dominant position allows them to exert significant influence over silver prices, making manipulation not just possible, but systemic.
The most common, obvious, and widespread form of silver manipulation is price slams—also known as “tamps”—which almost exclusively take place during the New York COMEX trading session between 8:30 and 11 AM EST. As I’ll explain in greater detail shortly, these slams occur on a high percentage of mornings, but they become even more frequent and aggressive when silver is attempting to break above a key technical or psychological level.
When silver approaches a breakout point that could trigger a snowball effect of additional buying, bullion banks step in to drop the hammer, forcefully slamming the price back down below that level. This calculated suppression is designed to demoralize existing silver investors, discourage new participants, and ensure that silver’s price languishes, preventing momentum from building in its favor.
Silver’s price action over the past year serves as a textbook example of how silver tamping works. As the chart below illustrates, silver has repeatedly attempted to break above the $32–$33 resistance zone, only to be slammed back down each time—except for the current breakout attempt (the outcome of which remains uncertain).
Notably, these persistent price slams have kept silver stagnant, even as gold has surged by approximately $1,000 per ounce to $3,000—a powerful 50% bull market rally that, under normal conditions, would have pulled silver higher due to their historically strong price relationship. However, bullion banks have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent silver from following its sibling, gold.
To see what one of these slams or tamps looks like on an intraday chart, let’s examine a particularly egregious example from Friday morning, February 14th. While the daily chart above provides a broader view of the price action, the intraday chart below captures exactly how it unfolded that morning. Bullion banks rely on the assumption that most people won’t scrutinize their tactics too closely—but that’s exactly what we’re going to do here.
Some of the most aggressive slams tend to occur on Friday mornings during the U.S. trading session. With the Asian and European markets closed, trading volume and liquidity are significantly lower, creating the perfect conditions for bullion banks to manipulate silver’s price with minimal resistance. This lack of market depth allows them to maximize their impact, giving them more “bang for their buck” when executing price suppression tactics. […]
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