Margin calls and liquidation explains all of the drops in PM's lately and it's a pretty pathetic attempt to scare money back into the USD and treasuries.
The REALLY smart money will hold their PM's and wait for the inevitable bounceback after the Pan Asian Gold Exchange opens in October.
If you invested in paper PM's (ETF's, SLV, GLD, margin accounts) you completely missed the point of having PM's.
If you don't HOLD it in your hand you don't OWN it completely.
"If you can't pick it up and run with it, you don't really own it." Robert Heinlein
"It might help to think of the US government as an alchemist. The alchemist can create as much gold as she pleases (from nothing) in order to buy up productivity and satisfy the growing monetary demands of the people she supplies currency to, but she has to be very careful not to debase her gold (you’ll notice that our trusty alchemist is female in this example as males have proven throughout history that they are not trustworthy overseers of government money). Most importantly, there is no solvency risk for the alchemist – only a pseudo form of default via currency collapse (hyperinflation). The alchemist only debases her gold when she issues an amount of gold that is in excess of productive capacity (inflation). But most importantly, she can never “run out” of gold. Therefore, she is never constrained in her ability to spend as a household, business or US state is. And more importantly, there is no solvency constraint on the state in the traditional manner that we think of for a household or business. That is, there is no such thing as the state becoming insolvent or not being able to meet its obligations – all of which are denominated in a currency that it alone can create."
This is from the author's site Pragmatic capitalism which smells like retro Fascism to me but I'm no "expert". Gold and silver are real. Note how government has to be an alchemist so that it can create fake real money. Also, this is the only monetary theory I know of that has gender confusion as part of its theory.