The gold and silver prices you see are paper contracts for the precious metals, not physical possession of the stuff. Contracts are being used to manipulate the market. Let’s say JPM sells the same ton of gold to a 1,000 different buyers with no one expecting to take delivery. Pretty easy to manipulate the price by creating nonexistent gold out of thin air for 999 buyers.
For similar hocus pocus, look at the Alibaba IPO on Friday. Goldman Sachs and other major players on Wall Street made a killing selling stock in a Chinese website that’s known for counterfeit goods. However, it wasn’t even stock in the company. Investors bought for $93 a share stock in a shell corporation with a P.O. Box in the Cayman Islands. The shell corp has a contract to receive Alibaba’s profits. After all, surely one could expect the ChiComs to honor this contract.
This type of organized crime gets you put away for life. On Wall Street, you get an eight-figure bonus minus your campaign donations (bribes) to continue operating.
And lest we forget, the Facebook pump-and-dump.