No Country For Poor Man: CFTC Calls Unreturned, Calls Unanswered

A hot coffee next to my laptop in a coastal coffeehouse in Santa Barbara, the treed mountains carved by creeks to the east and the uncivilized Channel Islands that serve as a backdrop to oil refineries in the Pacific to the west, I thought that Bart Chilton would be a fitting person to talk to on this Friday morning. After all, the CFTC hadn’t yet returned my phone inquiry from last week.  So, I called Bart. No answer. I left a voicemail. I called Gensler. No answer, voicemail. I called Mathew Hunter, Deputy Director of the Market and Trade Practice Surveillance branch. No answer, voicemail. Hello! Hunter! Have you spied on the high-speed algo bots? Have you tapped the phones in JPMorgan’s upper offices? “Blythe Masters.” That sounds suspicious.  How about that line? Jamie Dimon? Surely, of the 11+ agencies investigating JPMorgan, someone is already tapped into that line. What are you surveying exactly?  Granted, my message was surely more reserved. Didn’t want it getting passed onto the Ministry of Love where I’d certainly renounce my lover under a fiat shower.

I proceeded. I called Nancy Markowitz, the Deputy Director of the Exchange and Data Repository Branch. I suspected that perhaps this branch, something akin to the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth, where Winston Smith decayed daily at his desk, might have some documents so far spared the incinerator.  No answer, voicemail.

Startled secretaries answered some of my phone calls. “Hello, How are you? I have a question,” I would say.  Fumbling over their switchboard, they would connect me always to a different office, although they would always refer to this office as “Enforcement.”

“Um, yes sir. Let me forward you onto…enforcement.” Line forwarded.

“You have reached the main office.” No answer, voicemail.

“You have reached Examinations.” No answer, voicemail.

Then, a returned phone call!

“Hello?”

“Yes, hello.” This is Peterson in Bart Chilton’s office returning your phone call.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Commission Chilton is traveling today, I don’t know if you’re in a hurry.”

“No,” I thought. “No hurry at The End of the Monetary System As We Know It.”

Peterson continued:

“If you email me your question, I can forward it onto Commissioner Chilton.”

I thought about The E-mail. The E-mail countless have already received from Bart Chilton:

…The Financial Times report related to silver is not only premature, but inaccurate in several respects.
Whenever the CFTC does take an action or actions related to our silver investigation, I am hopeful that we will do so in a fulsome and transparent manner. That will certainly be my desire in anything we do…
B‘

“I got that E-mail,” I thought.

Can’t anybody else at the CFTC confirm Chilton’s statement? Anybody at all? I asked Peterson:

“My question is regarding the status of the CFTC silver probe. I was wondering if it was still being investigated by the CFTC? Do you know about that?”

“Well, um…not anything that I could say, I would have to talk to Commissioner Chilton about that…”

The bootlicking, oh the bootlicking! The poor man has no voice when it comes to a high-profile fraud investigation about the poor man’s gold.

Despite total market manipulation without representation, well-respected news website Seeking Alpha went to press 10 August with the assumption that “the investigation will continue.” This is grounds, according to Seeking Alpha, to suspect “that a possible breakout in silver is still on. The reason is that when manipulation is confirmed, it will immediately push the silver price higher due to a possible ban on short selling of the silver market.” This would certainly be the case if manipulation ceased, as Eric Sprott recently indicated: “If silver weren’t manipulated, it would be at $US 150/ounce right now.”

Seeking Alpha wisely observed that in July, “a significant rise in short positions has been found….going from 13614 short positions end June to 23025 short positions end July.” The analyst then cites this as reason for “a rise in the silver price in the next few months.”

Seeking Alpha is not alone in this forecast. GATA’s Bill Murphy and silver investor David Morgan have both imparted the same sentiment.

But is silver really set for price rise over the coming months?

Silver is waiting on two significant, state driven events; that is, the CFTC investigation or more Quantitative Easing. In terms of the former, there is no concrete evidence that silver manipulation will be found and, even if it were, what exactly would come to light about the silver manipulation? Everybody knows markets are manipulated. That’s common sense now. Certainly, which particular truths come out about the silver manipulation are as important, if not more important, as the general acknowledgement of the already obvious manipulation. The markets know they are corrupt.  The devil will be in the details.

Curious it is that the shorts have so dramatically increased alongside the silver-probe controversy (a distracting controversy within the controversy?). Coincidence? Probably not. But, this does not necessarily mean silver has hit a bottom, although it deserves to be done with and moved on from the recent consolidation pattern.  Silver has had a difficult year. The market is traumatized from the drive-by massacre on Mayday of last year as the working man’s gold began to have its US denominated value  halved in the quiet seas of eastern Sunday markets.

Silver has every reason to increase in value. It is the only commodity on the planet that is priced lower than it was in 1980. But, silver has all along had every reason to increase in value, especially over the last decade+.  And this is exactly what it has done. Why silver? Why Now? Because it makes government regulators shake at the thought of picking up the pieces of a shattered dollar paradigm. (I guess they don’t expect a pay increase after the wake?) But, this “long-term secular bull market” will remain just that: long-term.

Over time, silver is going mainstream as banker pillory conflagrates. Under the sheets of manipulation, silver’s got a little-known secret buoying it’s inverse of the US Dollar: supply-and-demand. Unlike the contrived supply-and-demand dynamics of the US Dollar, forged in the bot algos of Bretton-Woods desperation, the true economics behind silver is pure and historically grounded, no matter how skewered over the flames the market seems.

Worldwide demand will persist, and this sends shivers down the spines of bankers and transnational corporations that need cheap silver to run their operations. (Remember, if silver gets too expensive, the price of a Tomahawk missile will only increase the dollar costs of war) That’s why they’re taking the propaganda mainstream. Ignored, attacked, ground gained for the SLA. And soon, they will eat the crumbs fallen from the silver dinner tables of the Silver Liberation Army’s decorated ranks.