Once agian no facts...
Can you please point to a single case where speculators in commodity markets have manipulated the market...
Further...exclude all instances that occurred before the Internet and the mass participation of individual speculators buying and selling at the speed of light?
The dot com bubble was not market manipulation by speculators...it was as Greenspan stated..."IRRATIONAL Exuberance"...
The China Steel incident again...was not market manipulation by speculators...it was covert actions of a nation state...
Gold too huh? Then I guess copper, silver, palladium, uranium, lead and aluminum are also being manipulated?
Get a grip...there are now 6 billion people on this planet and billions of them have cell phones and TV's with satellite dishes...they see the same adds on TV you see...they see it, they want it...and the demand for raw materials is going to go through the roof over the next decade...and its not going to be manipulation...its called DEMAND
Oil?...you have no proof that oil speculators are manipulating the market...
Google? give me a break...people have run up googly pining for the market bubble days...Google will be trading at 50 just like all the rest of its big cap tech brethren in due time...
Go short some goggle...and be guilty of market manipulation as you define it...
Can you please point to a single case where speculators in commodity markets have manipulated the market...Hunt brothers who manipulated the silver market. Yes, they went bust but nevertheless their manipulations caused the price to increase ten-fold.
Further...exclude all instances that occurred before the Internet ...
OK, the California electricity market, manipulated by Enron et al. Yes, they were just taking advantage of inefficiencies created by gov rules, but many markets are inefficient to some extent.
For another, Saddam Hussein managed to turn a pretty penny before the recent Gulf War by alternating between saber-rattling and feigned meekness.
There is a respectable argument to be made that the Internet and automation of many trading activities introduce the possibility of new kinds of manipulations. Given a flaw in widely used systems one could conceivably exploit unstable feedbacks and really make a killing. Or perhaps by subtly hacking a router to adjust the timing of trades you could get a kind of millisecond-level resonance going. Hmmm, I smell a novel in that. Too bad I can't write worth a damn.